MEDITATIONS 

ON 

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY, 

AND ON 

THE RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
By M^GUIZOT. 



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, UNDER THE SUPER- 
INTENDENCE OF THE AUTHOR. 



LONDON: 

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
1864. 



LONDON : 

BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Natural Problems ....... 1 

II. Christian Dogmas 11 

III. The Supernatural 84 

IV. The Limits of Science 109 

V. Revelation . . . . . . . . 132 

VI. The Inspiration of Holy Scripture . . . . 142 

VII. God according to the Bible 157 

VIIT. Jesus Christ according to the Gospels . . . 230 

NOTE 299 



PREFACE. 



During the last nineteen centuries, Christianity 
has been often assailed, and has successfully re- 
sisted every attack. Of these attacks, some have 
been more violent, but none more serious than 
that of which it is, in these days, the object. 

For eighteen hundred years Christians were in 
turn persecutors and persecuted ; Christians per- 
secuted as Christians, Christians persecutors of 
every one who was not Christian — Christians 
mutually persecuting each other. This persecu- 
tion varied, it is true, in degree of cruelty with 
the age and the country, as it also did in the 
degree of inflexibility evinced and success attained 
in the prosecution of its object ■ but whatever 
the diversity of state, church, or punishment, 
whatever the degree of severity or laxity in the 



Vlll 



PREFACE. 



application of the principle, this principle was 
ever the same. After having had to endure pro- 
scription and martyrdom under the imperial 
government of Paganism, the Christian religion 
lived, in its turn, under the guard of the civil 
law, defended by the arms of secular power. 

In these days it exists in the very presence of 
Liberty. It has to deal with free thought, — with 
free discussion. It is called upon to defend, to 
guard itself, to prove incessantly and against every 
comer its moral and historical veracity, to vindi- 
cate its claims upon man's intelligence and man's 
soul. Eoman Catholics, Protestants, or Jews, 
Christians or philosophers, all, at least in our 
country, are sheltered from every persecution ; 
for no one without incurring the risk of ridicule 
could characterise as persecution the sacrifices or 
the inconveniences to which the expression of 
his opinion may occasionally subject him. To 
every man such expression of opinion is per- 
mitted, and can never lead to the forfeiture, on 
the part of any single individual, of any of his poli- 



PEEFACE. 



ix 



tical rights or privileges. Eeligious Liberty — that 
is to say, the liberty of believing ; of believing 
differently or of disbelieving — may be but imper- 
fectly accepted and guaranteed as a principle in 
certain states ; but it still is evident that it is 
becoming so every day more and more, and that 
it will eventually become the Common Law of the 
civilised world. 

One of the circumstances that render this fact 
pregnant with importance is that it does not 
stand isolated ; but holds its place in the great 
Intellectual and Social Kevolution, which, after the 
fermentation and the preparation of centuries, has 
broken out and is in course of accomplishment in 
our own days. The scientific spirit, the prepon- 
derance of the democratic principle, and that of 
political liberty, are the essential characteristics 
and invincible tendencies of this revolution. 
These new forces may fall into enormous errors 
and commit enormous faults, the penalty for 
which they will ever dearly pay ; still they are 
definitively installed in modern society ; the 



X 



PREFACE. 



sciences will continue to develop themselves in 
its bosom in the full independence of their methods 
and of their results ; the democracy will establish 
itself in the positions which it has conquered, and 
on the ground which has been opened to it ; poli- 
tical liberty in the midst of its storms and its disap- 
pointments will still, sooner or later, cause itself 
to be accepted as the necessary guarantee for all 
the acquisitions and all the progress possible in 
society. These are the grand predominant facts 
to which all public institutions will now have to 
adapt themselves, and with which all authority 
whose action is upon the mind requires to live at 
peace. 

Christianity also must submit to the same 
tests and trials. As it has surmounted all others, 
so also will it surmount this ; its essence and 
origin would not be divine did they not permit it 
to adapt itself to all the different forms of human 
institutions, to serve them now as a guide, now as 
a support in their vicissitudes whether of adversity 
or prosperity. It is, however, of the most serious 



PEEFACE. 



XI 



importance for Christians not to deceive them- 
selves, either as to the nature of the struggle which 
they will have to sustain, or as to its perils and the 
legitimate arms which they may use to combat 
them. The attack directed against the Christian 
religion is one hotly carried on, now with a brutal 
fanaticism, now with a dexterous learning ; at 
one time with the appeal to sincere convictions, 
and at another invoking the worst passions ; some 
contest Christianity as false, others reject it as too 
exacting and imposing too much restraint ; the 
greater part apprehend it as a tyranny. Injustice 
and suffering are not so soon forgotten ; nor does 
one readily recover from the effect of terror. The 
memory of religious persecutions still lives, and 
this it is that maintains, in multitudes, whose 
opinions vacillate, aversion, prejudice, and a lively 
sentiment of alarm. Christians on their side are 
loth to recognise and accommodate themselves to 
the new order of society ; every moment they 
are shocked, irritated, terrified by the ideas and 
language to which that society gives utterance. 



xii 



PREFACE. 



Men do not so readily pass from a state of privi- 
lege, to one of community of rights — from a state 
of dominion to one of liberty ; they do not resign 
themselves without a stiwole to the audacious 

DO 

obstinacy of contradiction, to the daily necessity 
of resisting and conquering. Government accord- 
ing to principles of liberty is still more influenced 
by passion, and entails a necessity of still more 
exertion in the sphere of religion than of civil 
politics : believers find it still more difficult to 
support incredulity than governments to bear 
with oppositions ; and, nevertheless, these them- 
selves are forced to do so, and can only find in 
free discussion and in the full exercise of their 
peculiar liberties the force which they require to 
rise above their perilous condition, and reduce — 
not to silence, for that is impossible, but to an 
idle warfare — their inveterate enemies. 

To leave that civil society, in which the diffe- 
rent sects of religion are now-a-days compelled to 
live in peace and side by side, and to enter reli- 
gious society itself, the Christian Church of our 



PREFACE. 



xiii 



days : — what is its actual position with respect to 
these grand questions which it has to discuss with 
the spirit of human liberty and audacity? Does 
it comprehend properly, does it suitably carry on 
the warfare in which it is engaged ? Does it tend 
in its proceedings to a re-establishment of a real 
peace, and active harmonious relations between 
itself and that general society in the midst of 
which it is living ? 

I say Christian Church. It is, in effect, the 
whole Church of Christ, and not such or such a 
church that is in these days attacked, and vitally 
attacked. When men deny the Supernatural 
World, the Inspiration of the Scriptures, and the 
Divinity of Jesus Christ, they really assail the 
whole body of Christians — Eomanists, Protestants 
or Greeks : they are virtually destroying the foun- 
dations of faith in all the belief of Christians, what- 
ever their particular difference of religious opinion 
or forms of ecclesiastical government. It is by 
faith that all Christian Churches live ; there is 
no form of government, monarchical or republican, 



XIV 



PREFACE. 



concentrated or diffused, that suffices to maintain 
a church ; there is no authority so strong, no 
liberty so broad, as to be able in a religious society 
to dispense with the necessity of faith. For what 
is it that unites in a church if it is not faith ? 
Faith is the bond of souls. When then the foun- 
dations of their common faith are attacked, the 
differences existing between Christian Churches 
upon special questions, or the diversities of their 
organization or government, become secondary 
interests ; it is from a common peril that they 
have to defend themselves ; or they must recon- 
cile themselves to see dried up the common source 
from which they all derive sustenance and life. 

I fear that the sentiment of this common peril 
is not, in all the Christian Churches, as clear and 
well defined, as deep and predominant, as their 
common safety requires. In presence of similar 
questions everywhere varied, of identical attacks 
everywhere directed against the vital facts and 
dogmas of Christianity, I dread Christians of the 
different communions not concentrating all their 



PREFACE. 



XV 



forces upon the rnigiity struggles in which they 
are, all, to engage. My dread, however, is un- 
attended by astonishment. Although the danger 
is the same for all, the traditional opinions and 
habits, and consequently the actual dispositions, 
are very different. Many Eomanists feel the per- 
suasion that Faith would be saved were they only 
delivered from liberty of thought. Many Pro- 
testants believe that they are but employing their 
right of free examination, and do not lose their 
title to be regarded as Christians, when they are 
in effect abandoning the foundations and with- 
drawing from the source of Faith. Eoman Catho- 
licism has not sufficient reliance on its roots, and 
respects too much its branches ; no tree exists that 
does not need culture and clearing in accordance 
with climate and season, if it is to be expected to 
continue to bear always good fruit ; but the roots 
should be especially defended from every attack. 
Protestantism is too forgetful that it also has 
roots from which it cannot be separated without 
perishing, and that religion is not what an annual 



Xvi PEEFACE. 

is in vegetation : a plant that men cultivate and 
renew at their pleasure. "Whilst the Eomanists 
dread freedom of thought too much, the Protes- 
tants on their side have too great a fear of autho- 
rity. Some believe that inasmuch as religious 
Faith has firm and fixed points, movement and 
progress are incompatible with religious society; 
others affirm that a religious society can never have 
fixed points, and that religion consists in religious 
sentiment and individual belief. Wliat would 
have become of Christianity, had it from its birth 
been condemned to the immobility which the 
former recommend; and what would become of 
it at the present day, were it surrendered, as the 
latter would have it, to the caprice of every mind, 
and the wind of every day \ 

Happily, God permits not that, at this crisis, 
the true principles and the true interests of the 
Christian Keligion should remain without suffi- 
cient defenders. Eomanists there are who under- 
stand their age and the new constitution of 
society, who accept frankly its liberty, religious 



PREFACE. 



XVII 



and politic : it is precisely they who have most 
boldly testified their attachment to the faith of 
Rome, who have claimed with most ardor the 
essential liberties of their church, and defended 
with most energy the rights of its chief. Nor 
are Protestants wanting who have used with 
the most untiring zeal all the liberty acquired 
in our days by Protestantism ; they have founded 
all those associations and originated all those 
undertakings which have manifested the vital 
energy and extended the action of the Protes- 
tant Church ; they have demanded and they 
continue to demand, for this church, the re- 
establishment of its Synods, that is to say, its 
religious autonomy. Amongst these Protestants, 
where men have appeared who have not found 
in the Protestant Church as by law established 
the entire satisfaction of their convictions, they 
have felt no hesitation to separate from it and 
to found, with their own means alone, indepen- 
dent churches. It may be affirmed also of the 

Protestants that they have most largely put in 

b 



xvm 



PREFACE. 



practice all the rights and all the liberties of 
Protestantism, in the internal ordeal through 
which Christianity is at present passing ; it is 
precisely they who assert most loudly the dogmas 
of the Christian Faith and maintain most in- 
flexibly the authoritative rights established by 
law in the bosom of their church. The Liberal 
Eomanists of the present day are the most 
zealous defenders of the fundamental traditions 
and institutions of Catholicism. The Protestants 
who have been the most active during .the last 
half-century in the exercise of the liberties of 
Protestantism are the firmest maintainers of its 
doctrines and of its vital rules. 

Humanly speaking, it is upon the influence 
exercised and to be exercised in their respective 
churches and on the public, by these two classes 
of Christians, that depends the peaceable issue of 
the crisis through which Christianity is in these 
days passing. Our society is, doubtless, far from 
meriting the title of a Christian one ; still it 
cannot be characterised as anti- Christian ; con- 



PREFACE. 



XIX 



sidered as one vast whole, it has no hostile or 
general prejudice against the Christian religion : 
it maintains the habits, the instincts, I would 
willingly add the longings, of Christians ; it is con- 
scious that Christian Faith and Ordinance serve 
powerfully its interests with respect to order and 
peace ; the fanatical opponents of Christianity 
exercise upon it far more disquieting than seduc- 
tive influences, for it has already had experience 
of their empire; and where society appears to offer 
a silent acquiescence or even to pride itself upon 
them, still at bottom it dreads their progress. 

Such being the state of the case, and such 
the constitution of society, how are we to draw 
men away from their apathy and their ignorance 
in matters of religion \ How lead them back 
to Christianity ? They alone can accomplish this 
object, who, in their defence and propagation of the 
religion of Jesus, shall not wound society itself in 
the ideas, sentiments, rights and interests which 
have at present rooted themselves in its very 

life and energies. Like religion, modern society 

b 2 



XX 



PREFACE. 



has also its fixed points and its invincible ten- 
dencies : it can never be set on terms of har- 
mony with the former unless by the concurring 
action of men who have with each of them a 
genuine and deep sentiment of sympathy. Since 
the Christian Eeligion lives in these times con- 
fronting civil liberty, those alone can be efficient 
champions of religion who at the same time 
profess fully the Christian Faith and accept with 
sincerity the tests of Liberty. 

But in pursuing their pious and salutary enter- 
prise, let not these liberal Christians flatter them- 
selves with the probability of any prompt or 
complete success : maintain and propagate the 
Christian faith they may, but they will never be 
able in the bosom of society to get rid either of 
incredulity or doubt; even while combating them 
they must learn to endure their presence : in insti- 
tutions of freedom there is essentially an inter- 
mixture of good and evil, of truth and error ; 
contrary ideas and dispositions produce and 
develop themselves in it simultaneously. " Think 



PREFACE. 



XXI 



not that I am come to send peace on earth : 
I came not/' said Jesus to his apostles, " to 
send peace, but a sword/' * The sword of Jesus 
Christ, that is, Christianity, at war with human 
error and shortcomings ; a victory, still a victory 
ever incomplete in an incessant struggle, — that is 
the condition to which those must submit with 
resignation who, in the bosom of liberty, defend 
the truth of Christianity. 

Were these valiant and intelligent champions 
of the faith of Jesus not adopted and accredited 
as such in the churches to which they belong ; did 
the Church of Eome furnish ground for thinking 
her essentially hostile to the fundamental prin- 
ciples and rights of modern society, and that she 
only tolerates them as Moses tolerated divorce 
amongst the Jews, "because of the hardness of 
their heart"; and, on the other hand, did the 
rejectors of the Supernatural, of the Inspiration of 
the Scriptures, and of the Divinity of Jesus Christ, 
predominate in the bosom of Protestantism ; and 

* Matt. x. 34. 



xxii 



PREFACE. 



finally, did the latter then become nought but a 
hesitating system of philosophy ; if all these 
deplorable things were to be realised, I am far 
from thinking that, owing to such faults, such 
disasters, the religion of Christ would vanish from 
the world and definitively withdraw from men 
its light and its support : the destinies of religion 
are far above human errors ; but still, beyond all 
doubt, for mankind to be turned back from them, 
and for the light to return to their soul and har- 
mony to modern society, there would have again 
to burst out in the human soul and in society one 
of those immense troubles, one of those revolu- 
tionary whirlwinds, whose evils man is compelled 
actually to undergo before he can derive benefit 
from its lessons. 

On the point of addressing myself to questions 
more profound and of a less transitory nature, 
I content myself with having merely indicated 
what I think of the crisis that agitates Chris- 
tendom at the present day, as also of its main 
cause, its perils, and the chances, good or bad, 



PEE FACE. 



xxiii 



that it holds out for the future. In the work of 
which the first part is now before the public, I 
omit all the circumstantial facts and details as 
well as the discussions that grow out of them, and 
it is only with the Christian Eeligion as it is in 
itself, with its fundamental belief and its reason- 
ableness, that I occupy myself ; it has been my 
purpose to illustrate the truth of Christianity by 
contrasting it with the systems and the doubts 
that men set in array against it. It is my inten- 
tion to avoid all direct and personal polemics ; 
express reference to individuals embarrasses and 
envenoms all questions in controversy, and gives 
rise to ill-judged deference or unjust invective, 
two descriptions of falsity for which alike I feel 
no sympathy : let me have then for adversaries 
ideas alone ; and whatever these may be, I admit 
beforehand the possibility of sincerity on the part 
of those that prefer them. Without this admis- 
sion all serious discussion is out of the question ; 
and neither the intellectual enormity of the error, 
nor its awful practical consequences, positively 



xxiv 



PREFACE. 



precludes sincerity on the part of him that pro- 
mulgates it. The mind of man is still more 
easily led astray than his heart, and is still more 
egotistical ; after having once conceived and 
expressed an idea, it attaches itself to it as to its 
own offspring, takes a pride in imprisoning itself 
in it, as if it were so taking possession of the pure 
and entire truth. 

These Meditations will be divided into four 
series. In the first, which forms this volume, I 
explain and establish what constitutes, in my 
opinion, the essence of the Christian religion ; 
that is to say, what those natural problems are, 
that correspond with the fundamental dogmas 
that offer their solution, the supernatural facts 
upon which these same dogmas repose — Creation, 
Revelation, the Inspiration of the Scriptures, God 
according to the Biblical account, and Jesus 
according to the Gospel narrative. Next to the 
Essence of the Christian religion comes its history ; 
and this will be the subject of a second series of 
Meditations, in which I shall examine the authen- 



PREFACE. 



XXV 



ticity of the Scriptures, the primary causes of 
the foundation of Christianity, Christian Faith, 
as it has always existed throughout its different 
ages and in spite of all its vicissitudes ; the 
great religious crisis in the sixteenth century 
which divided the Church and Europe between 
Koman Catholicism and Protestantism ; finally 
those different anti - Christian crises, which at 
different epochs and in different countries have 
set in question and imperilled Christianity itself, 
but which dangers it has ever surmounted. 
The third Meditation will be consecrated to 
the study of the actual state of the Christian 
religion, its internal and external condition : 
I shall retrace the regeneration of Christianity 
which occurred amongst us at the commencement 
of the nineteenth century, both in the Church 
of Eome and in the Protestant churches ; the 
impulse imparted to it at the same epoch by the 
Spiritualistic Philosophy that then began again 
to flourish, and the movement in the contrary 
direction which showed itself very remarkably 



XXVI 



PEEFACE. 



soon afterwards in the resurrection of Materialism, 
of Pantheism, of Scepticism, and in works of 
historical criticism. I shall attempt to determine 
the idea, and consequently, in my opinion, the 
fundamental error of these different systems, 
the avowed and active enemies of Christianity. 
Finally, in the fourth series of these Meditations 
I shall endeavour to discriminate and to cha- 
racterise the future destiny of the Christian 
religion, and to indicate by what course it is 
called upon to conquer completely and to sway 
morally this little corner of the universe termed 
by us our earth, in which unfold themselves the 
designs and power of God, just as, doubtless, 
they do in an infinity of worlds unknown to us. 

I have passed thirty-five years of my life in 
struggling, on a bustling arena, for the establish- 
ment of political liberty and the maintenance 
of order as established by law. I have learnt, in 
the labours and trials of this struggle, the real 

CO ' 

worth of Christian Faith and of Christian Liberty. 
God permits me, in the repose of my retreat, to 



PEEFACE. 



xxvii 



consecrate to their cause what remains to me 
of life and of strength. It is the most salutary 
favour and the greatest honour that I can receive 
from His goodness. 

GUIZOT. 

Val-Richer, June, 1864. 



MEDITATIONS 



OX THE ESSENCE OF 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



FIRST MEDITATION. 



NATURAL PROBLEMS. 

From the very origin of the human race, 
wherever man has existed, or still exists, certain 
questions have peculiarly and irresistibly fixed 
his attention, and they continue to do so at the 
present hour. This arises not alone from a 
feeling of natural curiosity, or the ardent thirst 
for knowledge, but from a deeper and more 
powerful motive: the destiny of man is intimately 
involved in these questions ; they contain the 

B 







THE CHRISTIAN" RELIGION. 



secret not only of all that he sees around him, 
but of his own being ; and when he aspires to 
solve them, it is not merely because he desires 
to understand the spectacle of which he is a 
beholder, but because he feels, and is conscious 
of being himself an actor in the great drama of 
existence, and because he seeks to ascertain his 
own part there, and comprehend his own destiny. 
His present conduct and his future lot are as 
much at issue as the satisfaction of his thought. 
These great problems are, for man, not questions 
of science, but questions of life : in considering 
them he feels himself compelled to say, with 
Hamlet, "To be or not to be, that is the 
question." 

Whence does the world proceed, and whence 
does man appear in the midst of it? What is 
the origin of each, and whither does each tend? 
What are their beginning and their end? Laws 
there are which govern them ; — is there a legis- 
lator ? Under the empire of these laws, man 



FIRST MEDITATION. 



3 



feels and calls himself free : is he so in reality ? 
How is his liberty compatible with the laws which 
govern him and the world ? Is he a passive 
instrument of fate, or a responsible agent? What 
are the ties and relations which connect him with 
the Legislator of the world % 

The world and man himself present a strange 
and painful spectacle. Good and evil, both 
moral and physical, order and disorder, joy and 
sorrow, are here intimately blended and yet in 
continual antagonism. Whence come this com- 
mingling and this strife ? Is good or is evil 
the condition and the law of man and of the 
world ? If good, how then has evil found ad- 
mission ? Wherefore suffering and death ? Why 
this moral disorder? — the calamities which so 
frequently befall the good, and the prosperity, 
so abhorrent to our feelings, which attends the 
wicked ? Is this the normal and definitive state 
of man and of the world ? 

Man is conscious that he is at the same time 
great and little, strong and feeble, powerful and 

B 2 



1 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



impotent. He finds in himself matter for admi- 
ration and for love, and yet he suffices not to 
himself in any respect ; he seeks an aid, a sup- 
port, beyond and above himself : he asks, he 
invokes, he prays. What mean these inward 
disquietudes, — these alternate impulses of pride 
and weakness? Have they, or not, a meaning 
and an object ? "Why prayer ? 

Such are the natural problems, now dimly 
felt, now clearly defined, which in all ages and 
among all nations, in every form and in every 
degree of civilization, by instinct or by reflexion, 
have arisen, and still arise, in the human mind. 
I indicate only the greatest, the most apparent: 
I might recall many others which are connected 
with them. 

Not only are these problems natural to man ; 
they appertain to him alone ; they are his pecu- 
liar privilege. Man alone, among all creatures 
known to us, perceives and states them, and feels 
himself imperiously called upon to solve them 
I borrow the following admirable observations 



FIKST MEDITATION. 



5 



from M. de Chateaubriand : — " Why does not the 
ox as I do 1 It can lie down upon the grass, 
raise its head toward heaven, and in its lowing 
call upon that unknown Being who fills this 
immensity of space. But no : content with the 
turf on which it tramples, it interrogates not 
those suns in the firmament above, which are the 
grand evidence of the existence of God. Animals 
are not troubled with those hopes which fill the 
heart of man ; the spot on which they tread yields 
them all the happiness of which they are suscep- 
tible ; a little grass satisfies the sheep ; a little 
blood gluts the tiger. The only creature that 
looks beyond himself, and is not all in all to 
himself, is man."* 

From these problems, natural and peculiar to 
man, all religions have sprung. The object of 
them all is to satisfy man's thirst for their solu- 
tion. As these problems are the source of religion, 
the solutions they receive are its substance and 
foundation. There prevails in our days a very 

* Genie chi Christianisme, vol. i. p. 208, edit, of 1831, 



6 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



general tendency to regard religion as consisting 
essentially — I might say wholly — in religious 
sentiment, in those lofty and vague aspirations 
which are termed the poetry of the soul, beyond 
and above the realities of life. Through the reli- 
gious sentiment, the soul enters into relation with 
the Divine order of things ; and this relation, of 
a wholly personal and intimate character, inde- 
pendent of all positive dogma, of any organized 
Church, is deemed to be all-sufficient for man, the 
true and needful religion. 

Unquestionably the religious sentiment, the 
intimate and personal relation of the soul with 
the Divine order, is essential and necessary to 
religion ; but religion is more than this — much 
more. The human soul is not to be divided and 
restricted to certain faculties selected and exalted, 
whilst the rest are condemned to slumber. Man 
is not a mere sensitive and poetic being, aspiring 
to rise above the present and material world by 
love and imagination : he not only feels, but he 
thinks ; he requires to know and believe as well 



FIE ST MEDITATION. 



7 



as love ; it is not enough that his soul should 
be capable of emotion and aspiration • he requires 
that it should be fixed, and rest upon convictions 
in harmony with his emotions. This it is that 
man seeks in religion ; he requires something 
more than a pure and noble rapture ; he requires 
enlightenment, as well as sympathy. But if the ( 
moral problems that beset his thought are not 
solved, what he experiences may be poetry, — it is 
not religion. 

I cannot contemplate unmoved the troubles of 
men of lofty minds, seeking in the religious senti- 
ment alone a refuge against doubt and impiety. 
It is well to preserve, in the shipwreck of faith 
and the chaos of thought, the great instincts of 
our nature, and not to lose sight of the sublime 
requirements which remain unsatisfied. I know 
not to what extent, men of eminent minds may 
thus compensate, by their sincerity and fervour of 
sentiment, for the void in their belief ; but let 
them not deceive themselves ; barren aspirations 
and specious doubts satisfy a man as little as to 



8 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



his future spiritual interests as with, respect to his 
condition in the present life ; the natural problems 
to which I have alluded will ever be the great 
weight pressing upon the soul, and religious senti- 
ment will never alone suffice to be the religion of 
mankind. 

Besides this apotheosis of religious sentiment, 
some at the present day have essayed a different, 
a more serious and more daring theory. Far from 
sounding the natural problems to which religions 
correspond, schools of philosophy, occupying a 
prominent intellectual position, — the Pantheistic 
School, and the so-called Positive School, — sup- 
press and deny them altogether. In their view, 
the world has existed, of itself, from all eternity, 
as have the laws also by which it is sustained and 
developed. In their elementary principles, and 
taken altogether, all things have ever been what 
they now are, and what they will ever continue 
to be. There is no mystery in this universe ; 
there exist only facts and laws, naturally and 
necessarily linked together ; and these furnish the 



FIRST MEDITATION. 



9 



field for human science, which, although incom- 
plete, is yet indefinitely progressive, in its power 
as well as in its operations. 

According to these views, Divine Providence 
and human liberty, the origin of evil, the com- 
mingling and the strife of good and evil in the 
world, and in man, the imperfection of the present 
order of things, and the destiny of man, the pro- 
spect of the re- establishment of order in the future 
— these are all mere dreams, freaks of man's 
thought : no such questions indeed exist, inas- 
much as the world is eternal, it is in its actual 
state complete, normal, and definitive, though at 
the same time progressive. The remedy for the 
moral and physical evils which afflict mankind, 
must then be sought, not in any power supe- 
rior to the world, but simply in the progress 
of the sciences and the advance of human 
enlightenment. 

I shall not here discuss this system ; I do not 
even qualify it by its true name ; I merely recapi- 
tulate its tenets. But, at the first and simple 



10 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



aspect, what contempt does it manifest of the 
spontaneous and universal instincts of man! What 
heedlessness of the facts which fill and never cease 
to characterize the universal history of the human 
race ! 

Nevertheless to this we are come : not a solution, 
but the negation of the natural problems, which 
irresistibly occupy the human soul, is presented to 
man for his full satisfaction and repose. Let him 
follow the mathematical or physical sciences ; let 
him be a mechanician, chemist, critic, novelist, or 
poet ; but let him not enter upon what is termed 
the sphere of religious and theological inquiry : 
here are no real questions to solve, nought to 
investigate, nothing to do, — nothing to expect, — 
absolutely nothing. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



CHRISTIAN DOGMAS. 

The Christian religion knows man better, and 
treats man better : it has other answers to his 
questions ; and it is between the absolute nega- 
tion of the problems of religion and the Christian 
solution of these problems that the discussion lies 
at the present day. 

Some words there are which we now regard 
with distrust and alarm : we suspect their mask- 
ing illegitimate pretensions and tyranny. Such, 
in our days, has been the lot of the word dogma. 
To many this word imparts an imperious necessity 
to believe, at once offending and disquieting. 
Singular contrast ! On all sides we seek for 
principles, and we take alarm at dogmas. 

This sentiment, however absurd in itself, is in 



12 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

no way strange ; Christian dogmas have served 
as motive and pretext for so much iniquity, so 
many acts of oppression and cruelty, that their 
very name has become tainted and suspected. 
The word bears the penalty of the reminiscences 
which it awakens : and justly. All attacks upon 
the liberty of conscience, all employment of force 
to extirpate or to impose religious belief, is, and 
ever has been, an iniquitous and tyrannical act. 
All powers, all parties, all churches, have held 
such acts to be not only permissible, but enjoined 
by the Divine Law : all have deemed it not merely 
their right, but their duty, to prevent and to 
punish by law and human force, error in matters 
of religion. They may all allege in excuse, the 
sincerity of their belief in the legitimacy of this 
usurpation. The usurpation is not the less enor- 
mous and fatal, and perhaps indeed it is, of all 
human usurpations, the one which has inflicted on 
men the most odious torments and the grossest 
errors. It will constitute the glory of our time 
to have discarded this pretension : nevertheless it 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



13 



yet exists, with persistency, in certain states, in 
certain laws, in certain recesses of the human 
soul and of Christian society ; and there is, and 
ever will be, need to watch and to combat it, to 
render its banishment unconditional and without 
appeal. Subdued, however, it is : civil freedom 
in matters of faith and religious life has become 
a fundamental principle of civilization and of law. 
These questions, affecting the relations of man to 
God, are no longer discussed or adjusted in the 
arena and by a recourse to the hand of political 
and executive power ; but they are transported 
to the sphere of the intellect and left to the 
uncontrolled working of the mind itself. 

But again, ir this sphere of the intellect, these 
questions sfc i start up and call loudly for their 
peculiar solution — that is, for the fundamental 
facts and ideas, the principles in effect which their 
nature requires. The Christian religion has its 
own principles, which constitute the rational basis 
of the faith it inculcates and the life which 
it enjoins. These are termed its dogmas. The 



J4 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



Christian dogmas are the principles of the Chris- 
tian religion, and the Christian solutions of the 
problems of natural religion. 

Let men of a serious mind, who have not 
entirely rejected the Christian religion, and who 
still admire it, whilst denying its fundamental 
dogmas, beware of this : the flowers whose per- 
fume captivates them will quickly fade, the fruits 
they delight in will soon cease to grow when the 
axe shall have been applied to the roots of the 
tree that bears them. 

For myself, arrived at the term of a long life, 
one of labour, of reflection, and of trials, — of 
trials in thought as well as in action, — I am con- 
vinced that the Christian dogmas are the legiti- 
mate and satisfactory solutions of those religious 
problems which, as I have said, nature suggests 
and man carries in his own breast, and from 
which he cannot escape. 

I beg, at the outset, Theologians, whether Catho- 
lic or Protestant, to pardon me. I have no design 
to cite or to explain, or to maintain, all the various 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



15 



doctrinal points, all the articles of faith, which 
have been included in the term of Christian 
dogmas. During eighteen centuries, Christian 
theology has very often ventured to advance out 
of and beyond the limits of the Christian reli- 
gion : man has confounded his own labours with 
the work of God. It is the natural consequence 
of the union of human activity and human 
imperfection. This same result may be traced 
throughout the history of the world, especially 
in the history of the society and religion upon 
which God has grafted the Christian religion. 

At the time when God raised up Jesus Christ 
amor;; the Jews, the faith and the law of the 
Jews wt r e no longer solely and purely the faith 
and law which God had given to them by Moses : 
the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and many others, 
had essentially modified, enlarged, and altered 
both. Christianity too has had its Pharisees and 
its Sadducees ; in its turn it has been made to 
feel the workings of human thought and the 
influence of human passions on its Divine reve- 



16 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



lation. I cannot recognize, in all the uncertain 
fruits of these labours, the claim to the title of 
Christian dogmas. Nevertheless I have no inten- 
tion here to specify particularly and to combat 
such tenets in the Church and in Christian 
theology, as I Can neither accept nor defend. 
It is not for me — and I venture to say, it is 
not for any Christian — to scan critically the 
interior of the Edifice, at a moment when its 
foundations are ardently attacked. Far rather 
I prefer to rally in a common defence all who 
abide within its walls. I shall here allude only 
to the dogmas common to them all, which I 
sum up in these terms : — The Creation, Provi- 
dence, Original Sin, the Incarnation, and the 
Kedemption. These constitute the essence of 
the Christian religion, and all who believe in 
these dogmas I hold to be Christians. 

One leading and common characteristic in 
these dogmas strikes me at the outset : they 
deal frankly with the religious problems natural 
to and inherent in man, and offer at once the 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



17 



solution. The dogma of Creation attests the 
existence of God, as Creator and Legislator, and 
it attests also the link which unites man with 
God. The dogma of Providence explains and 
justifies prayer, that instinctive recourse of man 
to the living God, to that supreme Power which 
is ever present with him in life, and which influ- 
ences his destiny. The dogma of Original Sin 
accounts for the presence of evil and disorder 
in mankind and in the world. The dogmas of 
the Incarnation and of Eedemption, rescue man 
from the consequences of evil, and open to him 
a prospect in another life of the re-establishment 
of order. Unquestionably, the system is grand, 
complete, well connected, and forcible : it answers 
to the requirements of the human soul, removes 
the burden which oppresses it, imparts the 
strength which it needs, and the satisfaction to 
which it aspires. Has it a rightful claim to all 
this power ? Is its influence legitimate, as well 
as efficacious \ 

In my own mind I have borne the burthen of 

c 



18 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



the objections to the Christian system, and to 
each of its essential dogmas ; I have experienced 
the anxieties of doubt : I shall state how I have 
escaped from doubt, and the ground upon which 
my convictions have been founded. 



I. CREATION. 

The only serious opponents of the dogma of 
the Creation are those who maintain that the 
universe, the earth, the man upon the earth, have 
existed from all eternity, and, collectively, in the 
state in which they now are. No one however 
can hold this language, to which facts are invin- 
cibly opposed. How many ages man has existed 
on the earth, is a question that has been largely dis- 
cussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry 
in no way affects the dogma of the Creation 
itself: it is a certain and recognized fact, that 
man has not always existed on the earth, and 
that the earth has for long periods undergone 
different changes incompatible with man's exist- 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



19 



ence. Man therefore had a beginning : man has 
come upon the earth. How has he come there ? 

Here the opponents of the dogma of Creation 
are divided : some uphold the theory of spon- 
taneous generation; others, the transformation of 
species. According to one party, matter pos- 
sesses, under certain circumstances and by the 
simple development of its own proper power, the 
faculty of creating animated beings. According 
to others, the different species of animated beings 
which still exist, or have existed at various epochs 
and in the different conditions of the earth, are 
derived from a small number of primitive types, 
which have possessed, through the lapse of millions 
' and thousands of millions of ages, the power of 
developing and perfecting themselves, so as to 
gain admission, through transformation, into 
higher species. Hence they conclude, with more 
or less hesitation, that the human race is the 
result of a transformation, or a series of trans- 
formations. 

The attempt to establish the theory of spon- 

c 2 



20 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



taneons production dates from a remote period. 
Science has ever baffled it : the more its observa- 
tions have been exact and profound, the more 
have they refuted the hypothesis of the innate 
creative power of matter. This result has been 
again recently established by the attentive exami- 
nation of men of eminent scientific attainments, 
within and without the walls of the Academy 
of Sciences. But were it even otherwise, — could 
the advocates of the theory of spontaneous pro- 
duction refer to experiments hitherto irrefutable, 
these would furnish no better explanation of the 
first appearance of man upon earth, and I should 
retain my right to repeat here what I have 
advanced elsewhere on this subject:* — "Such a 
mode of generation cannot, nor ever could, pro- 
duce any but infant beings, in the first hour and 
in the first state of incipient life. It has, I 
believe, never been asserted, nor will any person 
ever affirm, that, by spontaneous generation, man 
—that is to say, man and woman, the human 
* L'Eglise et la Society Chretienne en 1861, p. 27. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



21 



couple — can have issued, or that they have issued 
at any period, from matter, of full form and 
stature, in possession of all their powers and 
faculties, as Greek paganism represented Minerva 
issuing from the brain of Jupiter. Yet it is only 
upon this supposition, that man, appearing for the 
first time upon earth, could have lived there to 
perpetuate his species and to found the human 
race. Let any one picture to himself the first 
man, born in a state of the earliest infancy, alive 
but inert> devoid of intelligence, powerless, in- 
capable of satisfying his own wants even for a 
moment, trembling, sobbing, with no mother to 
listen to or feed him ! And yet we have in this 
a picture of the first man, as presented by the 
system of spontaneous generation. It is mani- 
festly not thus that the human race first appeared 
upon earth." 

The system of the transformation of species is 
no less refuted by science than by the instincts of 
common sense. It rests upon no tangible fact, 
on no principle of scientific observation or historic 



22 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



tradition. All the facts ascertained, all the monu- 
ments collected in different ages and different 
places, respecting the existence of living species, 
disprove the hypothesis of their having undergone 
any transformation, any notable and permanent 
change : we meet with them a thousand, two 
thousand, three thousand years ago, the same 
as they are at the present day. In the same 
species the races may vary and undergo mutual 
changes : the species do not change ; and all 
attempts to transform them artificially, by cross- 
ings with allied species, have only resulted in 
modifications, which, after two or three genera- 
tions, have been struck with barrenness, as if 
to attest the impotence of man to effect, by the 
progressive transformation of existing species, a 
creation of new species. Man is not an ape 
transformed and perfected by some dim imper- 
ceptible fermentation of the elements of nature 
and by the operation of ages : this assumed 
explanation of the origin of the human species 
is a mere vague hypothesis, the fruit of an 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



23 



imagination ill comprehending the spectacle that 
nature presents, and therefore easily seduced to 
form ingenious conjectures : these their authors 
sow in the stream of events unknown and of 
time infinite, and trust to them for the realiza- 
tion of their dreams. The principle of the funda- 
mental diversity and the permanence of species 
— firmly upheld by M. Cuvier, M. Flourens, M. 
Coste, M. Quatrefages, and by all exact observers 
of facts — remains dominant in science as in 
reality.* 

Besides these vain attempts to supersede God 
the Creator, and to explain by the inherent and 
progressive power of matter, the origin of man 

* Cuvier — Discours sur les Revolutions du Globe, pp. 117, 
120, 124 (edit. 1825) ; Flourens — Ontologie Naturelle, pp. 
10 — 87 (1861) ; Journal des Savants (October, November, and 
December, 1863) ; three articles on the work of Ch. Darwin, On 
the Origin of Species and the Laws of Progress among Organised 
Beings ; Coste — Histoire Generale et Particuliere du Developpe- 
ment des Corps Organises ; Discours Preliminaire, vol. i. p. 23 ; 
Quatrefages — Metamorphoses de l'Homme et des Animaux, p. 
225 (1862) ; and his articles On the Unity of the Human 
Species, published in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," in 1860 
and 1861, and collected in one volume (1861). 



24 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



and of the world, the Christian dogma of Creation 
has yet other adversaries. One party, to combat 
it, seizes its arms from the Bible itself, alleging 
the account there given of the successive facts of 
the creation, of which the world and man were 
the result ; they cite and enumerate the difficul- 
ties of reconciling this account with the observa- 
tions and the conclusions of science. I shall 
weigh the force of this class of objections in 
treating of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, 
of their real object and true meaning ; but I at 
once raise the dogma of Creation above this 
attack, — placing it at its proper height and isola- 
tion : it is the general fact, it is the very principle 
of creation which constitutes the dogma ; what- 
ever may be the obscurities or the scientific diffi- 
culties presented by the biblical narrative, the 
principle and the general fact of the Creation 
remain unaffected : God the Creator does not the 
less remain in possession of His work. The 
Christian religion, in its essence, asserts and de- 
mands nothing more. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



25 



But lastly, the Christian dogma of Creation is 
met by the general objection raised against all the 
facts and all the acts which are termed superna- 
tural : that is to say, against the existence of God 
as well as the dogma of Creation, against all reli- 
gions in common with Christianity. Such a 
question requires to be considered, not with re- 
ference to any particular dogma, or with a view 
to defend one side only of the edifice of Chris- 
tianity. This point, then, I shall presently ex- 
amine frankly and in all its bearings. 



H. PROVIDENCE. 

God the Creator is also God the Preserver. 
He lives, and is at the same time the source of 
life. The union between Him and his creature 
does not cease when the creature is brought into 
existence. The dogma of Providence is conse- 
quent upon that of Creation. 

Prayer is more than the mere outburst of the 
desires or sorrows of the soul, seeking that satis- 



26 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



faction, strength, or consolation which it does not 
find within itself ; it is the expression of a faith, 
instinctive or reflective, obscure or clear, wavering 
or steadfast, in the existence, the presence, the 
power, and the sympathy of the Being to whom 
prayer is addressed. Without a certain measure 
of faith and trust in God, prayer would not burst 
forth, or would suddenly be dried up in the soul. 
If faith everywhere resists, and everywhere out- 
lives all the denials, all the doubts, and all the 
darkness which oppress mankind, it is that man 
bears within himself an imperishable conscious- 
ness of the enduring bond which connects him 
with God, and God with him. 

Far from destroying this sentiment, experience 
and the spectacle of life explain and confirm it. 
In reflecting on his destiny, man recognises in it 
three different sources, and divides, so to say, 
into three classes the facts which make up the 
whole. He is conscious of being subject to events 
which are the consequence of laws, general, per- 
manent, and independent of his will, but which 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



27 



by his intelligence he observes and comprehends. 
By the act of his free vail he also himself creates 
events, of which he knows himself to be author, 
and these have their own consequences and enter 
too into the tissue of his life. Lastly, he passes 
through events, in his view, neither the result of 
those general laws from which nothing can with- 
draw him, nor the act of his own liberty, — events 
of which he perceives neither the cause, the 
reason, nor the author. 

Man attributes this last class of events some- 
times to a blind cause, which he terms chance ; at 
another, to an intelligent and supreme intention 
which is in God. His mind at times revolts at 
the inanity of this word chance, which explains 
and defines nothing ; and he then pictures to 
himself a mysterious, impenetrable power, — a 
merely necessary chain of unknown facts, to which 
he gives the name of fatality, destiny. To account 
for this obscure and accidental part of human life, 
which originates neither from any general and 
conceivable laws, nor from the free will of man 



•28 



THE CHRISTIAN KELIGIOX. 



himself, we must choose between fatality and 
Providence, chance and God. 

I express my meaning without hesitation. "Who- 
ever accepts as a satisfactory explanation the theory 
of fatality and chance, does not truly believe in 
God. W 7 hoever believes truly in God, relies upon 
Providence. God is not an expedient, invented 
to explain the first link in the chain of causation, 
an actor called to open by creation the drama of 
the world, then to relapse into a state of inert 
uselessness. By the very fact of his existence, 
God is present with his work, and sustains it. 
Providence is the natural and necessary develop- 
ment of God's existence ; his constant presence 
and permanent action in creation. The universal 
and insuperable instinct which leads man to prayer, 
is in harmony with this great fact ; he who be- 
lieves in God cannot but have recourse to Him 
and pray to Him. 

Objections are raised to the name itself of God. 
He acts, it is said, only by general and permanent 
laws : how can we implore His interference in 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



29 



favour of our special and exceptional desires ? 
He is immutable, ever perfect, and ever the same : 
how is it conceivable that He lends Himself to 
the fickleness of human sentiments and wishes? 
The prayer which ascends to Him is forgetful of 
his real nature. Men have treated the attributes 
of God as furnishing an objection to his Provi- 
dence. 

This objection, so often repeated, never fails to 
astonish me. The majority of those who urge it, 
assert at the same time that God is incompre- 
hensible, and that we cannot penetrate the secret 
of his nature. "What then is this but to pretend 
to comprehend God ? and by what right do they 
oppose his nature to his providence, if his nature 
is, to us, an impenetrable mystery? I refrain 
from reproaching them for their ambition ; ambi- 
tion is the privilege and the glory of man ; but 
in retaining it, let them not overlook its legitimate 
limits. There is only this alternative : either man 
must cease to believe in God, because he cannot 
comprehend Him, or in effect admit his incom- 



30 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



prehensibility, and still at the same time believe 
in Him. He cannot pass and repass incessantly 
from one system to the other, now declaring God 
to be incomprehensible; now speaking of Him, of 
his nature and his attributes, as if He were within 
the province of human science. Great as is the 
question of Providence, the one I have here to 
consider is still greater, for it is the question of 
the very existence of God ; and the fundamental 
inquiry is to know whether He exists, or does not 
exist. God is at once light and mystery : in 
intimate relation with man, and yet beyond the 
limits of his knowledge. I shall presently endea- 
vour to mark the limit at which human know- 
ledge stops, and indicate its proper sphere ; but 
this I at once assume as certain : whoever, be- 
lieving in God and speaking of Him as incom- 
prehensible, yet persists in endeavouring to define 
Him scientifically, and seeks to penetrate the 
mystery, which he has yet admitted, is in great 
risk of destroying his own belief, and of setting 
God aside, which is one way of denying Him. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



31 



But I leave for a moment these two simul- 
taneous propositions, namely, the impossibility 
of comprehending God, and the necessity of be- 
lieving in Him; and I proceed at once to that 
objection to the special providence of God 
which is drawn from the general character of 
the laws of nature. This objection results from 
confounding very different things, and overlook- 
ing a fundamental one, — the fact characteristic 
indeed of human nature. It is true that the 
providence of God presides over the order of 
the world which He governs by general and per- 
manent laws : these laws would be more accu- 
rately designated by another name ; they are 
the Will of God, continually acting upon the 
world, for not only the laws but the Lawgiver 
are there ever present. But when God created 
man, He created him different from the physical 
world; free, and a moral agent; and hence there 
is a fundamental difference between the action 
of God on the physical world, and his action 
on man. I shall subsequently state my opinion 



32 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



as to the full meaning of the expression, " Man 
is a free being," and as to the nature of the 
consequences to which it leads ; for the present, 
I assume, as a certain and incontestable fact, this 
principle of human liberty, — of the free deter- 
mination of man considered as a moral agent. 
Admitting this, it cannot be said that God 
governs mankind at large, by general and per- 
manent laws; for what would this be but to 
ignore or annul the liberty granted to man, that 
is to say, to misconceive and mutilate the Work 
of God himself. Man exercises a free determi- 
nation, and in his own life actually gives birth to 
events which are not t^e result of any general 
and external laws. Divine Providence watches 
the operations of man s volition, and records the 
manner in which it has been exercised. It does 
not treat man as it deals with the stars in 
heaven and the waves of the ocean, which have 
neither thought nor will ; with man it has other 
relations than with nature, and employs a different 
mode of action. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



33 



There is little wisdom in instituting compari- 
sons between objects or facts not essentially 
analogous ; and the idea of God has been so 
often disfigured by representing Him in the 
image of man, that I mistrust the efficacy of 
any analogies borrowed from humanity to convey 
a conception of God. I cannot, however, over- 
look the fact, that God has created man in his 
own image, nor can I absolutely refrain from 
seeking, in nature or the life of man, some type 
to shadow forth the features of God. Let us 
consider the human family : the father and 
mother assist in directing the active develop- 
ment of the child ; they watch over it with 
authority and tenderness ; they control its liberty 
without annulling it, and they listen to its little 
prayers — now granting them, now refusing them, 
as their reason dictates, and with a view to 
the child's main and future interests. The 
child, without thought or design, by the spon- 
taneous instinct of its nature, recognizes the 
authority and feels the tenderness of its parents : 

D 



34 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

as it advances in age, it sometimes obeys and 
sometimes resists their injunctions, rising or mis- 
using its natural liberty ; but in all the fickleness 
of its will, it asks, it entreats, full of confidence 
— joyous and thankful when it obtains from 
its parents what it desires ; yet, when denied, 
still ready again to ask and to entreat with the 
same confidence as before. 

This is what takes place in the government of 
the human family when ruled according to the 
dictates of nature and right. An image we have 
here, imperfect but still true — a shadowing-forth, 
faint yet faithful — of Divine Providence. Thus it 
is that the Christian religion qualifies and describes 
the action of God in the life of man. It ex- 
hibits God as ever present and accessible to man, 
as a father to his child; it exhorts, encourages, 
invites man to implore, to confide in, to pray to 
God. It reserves absolutely the answer of God to 
that prayer; He will grant, or He will refuse: 
we cannot penetrate his motives — " The ways of 
God are not our ways." Nevertheless, to prayer, 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



35 



ceaseless and ever renewed, the Christian dogma 
associates the firm hope that "nothing is im- 
possible with God." This dogma is thns in full 
and intimate harmony with the nature of man ; 
whilst recognizing his liberty, it does homage to 
his dignity; in tendering to him the resource of 
an appeal to God it provides for his weakness. 
In science, it suppresses not the mystery which 
cannot be suppressed ; but, in man s fife, it solves 
the natural problem which weighs upon the soul. 



HI. ORIGINAL SIN. 

The dogmas of Creation and Providence bring 
us into the presence of God ; it is the action 
of God upon the world and man that they pro- 
claim and affirm. The dogma of Original Sin 
brings us back to man ; it is the act of man 
towards God, which stands at the very beginning 
of the history of mankind. 

In what does this dogma consist ? What are 

D 2 



36 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



the elements and the essential facts which con- 
stitute it, and upon which it is founded ? 

The dogma of Original Sin implies and affirms 
these propositions : 

1. That God, in creating man, has created him 
an agent, moral, free, and fallible ; 

2. That the will of God is the moral law of 
man, and obedience to the will of God is the 
duty of man, inasmuch as he is a moral and 
free agent ; 

3. That, by an act of his own free will, man 
has knowingly failed in his duty, by disobeying 
the law of God ; 

4. That the free man is a responsible being, 
and that disobedience to the law of God has 
justly entailed on him punishment ; 

5. That that responsibility and that punish- 
ment are hereditary, and that the fault of the 
first man has weighed and does weigh upon the 
human race. 

The authority of God, the duty of obedience 
to the law of God, the liberty and responsibility 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



87 



of man, the heritage of human responsibility- 
are, in their moral chronology, the principles 
and the facts comprised in the dogma of Original 
Sin. 

I turn away my attention for a moment from 
the dogma itself, its source, its history, the 
Biblical and Christian tradition of this first 
step in evil of the human race. And considering 
man, his nature, and his destiny in their actual 
and general state, I investigate and verify the 
moral facts as they manifest themselves at the 
present day, to the eyes of good sense, amidst 
the disputes of the learned. 

Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral 
authority, as well as the physical power of the 
parents who, humanly speaking, created him. 
Obedience is to him a duty, and at the same 
time a necessity. This physical necessity and 
this moral obligation, however ultimately con- 
nected with each other, are not one and identical ; 
and the child, in its spontaneous development, 
instinctively feels the moral obligation long 



38 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



before it is conscious of the physical necessity. 
The instinctive feeling of the obligation is united 
with the growing sentiment of affection ; and 
the child obeys the look, the voice of its mother, 
unconscious of its absolute dependence upon her. 

As the sentiment of affection and the instinct 
of obligatory obedience are the first dawn of 
moral good in the development of the child, so 
the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom, 
the first appearance of moral evil. It is with 
the voluntary disobedience of the child to the 
will of its mother that the moral infraction 
commences, and it is in disobedience that it 
resides. It considers neither the motives nor 
the consequences of its act ; it is simply conscious 
that it disobeys, and regards its mother with a 
mingled feeling of restlessness and defiance ; it 
tries, with hesitation, the maternal authority ; it 
strives to be, and especially to appear, independent 
of the natural and legitimate power which rules 
it, and which it recognises at the very moment 
when it opposes, its own will to that higher law. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



39 



As the child, so is the man. As man is born 
free, so. he lives free; and as he is born subject, so 
he lives subject. Liberty co-exists with authority 
and resists without annulling it. Authority exists 
before liberty, and as it does not yield to it, so 
neither does it supersede it. Man, inasmuch as 
he knows that he disobeys, renders homage to 
authority by the very fact of his disobedience. 
Authority, on its side, recognizes the liberty of 
man, by the condemnation which it passes on 
him for having misused it ; for he would not 
be responsible for his acts were he not free. In 
the co-existence of these two powers, authority 
and liberty, at one time in accordance, at another 
in conflict, lies the great secret of nature and of 
human destiny, the fundamental principle of man 
and of the world. 

Let it be clearly understood that I speak here 
of the moral world, of the world of thought and 
of will. In the physical world there is neither 
authority nor liberty ; there are merely certain 
forces, forces acting inevitably and unequally. 



40 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



If the question concerned the material world, 
could I do better than repeat what Pascal has 
admirably said : " Man is but a reed — the weakest 
in nature — but he is a reed which thinks ; the 
universe need not rise in arms to crush him ; a 
vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But 
were the universe to crush him, man would still 
be nobler than the power which killed him, for 
he knows that he dies ; and of the advantage 
which the universe has over him, the universe 
knows nothing." When man obeys or disobeys, 
he knows just as well that authority confronts 
him, as that liberty of action abides with himself. 
He knows what he does, and he charges himself 
with the responsibility. Moral order is here 
complete. 

Throughout all times and in all places, in all 
men, as in the first man, disobedience to legitimate 
authority is the principle and foundation of moral 
evil, or, to call it by its religious name, of sin. 

Disobedience has various and complicated 
sources ; it may spring from a thirst for inde- 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



41 



pendence, from ambition or presumptuous curi- 
osity, or from giving rein to human inclinations 
and temptations ; but, whatever its origin, dis- 
obedience is ever the essential characteristic of 
that free act which constitutes sin, as it is also the 
source of the responsibility which accompanies it. 

Eminent men, eminently pious men, have com- 
bated the doctrine of human liberty ; unable to 
reconcile it with what they term the divine pre- 
science, they have denied the fundamental fact of 
the nature of man, rather than fully acknowledge 
the mystery of the nature of God. Others, equally 
eminent and sincere, have limited themselves 
to raising doubts regarding human liberty, and 
denying it the value of an absolute and peremp- 
tory fact. In my opinion, they have confounded 
facts essentially different, although intimately 
blended; they have ignored the special and simple 
character of the very fact of free will. During a 
course of lectures which I delivered thirty-five 
years ago at the Sorbonne, on the history of civili- 
zation in France, having occasion to examine the 



42 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



controversy of St. Augustine with. Pelagius on free 
will, predestination, and grace, I explained these 
subjects in terms which I repeat here, finding no 
others which appear to me more exact and more 
complete : — ■ 

" The fact which lies at the foundation of the 
whole dispute," I said in 1829, "is liberty, free will, 
the human will. To comprehend this fact exactly, 
we must divest it of every foreign element, and con- 
fine it strictly to itself. It is the want of this pre- 
caution that has led to such frequent misconception 
of the thing itself ; men have not looked simply at 
the fact of liberty, and at that alone. It has been 
viewed and described, so to speak, pele-mele with 
other facts, closely connected to it, it is true, in 
the moral life of man, but which are no less essen- 
tially different. For example, human liberty has 
been said to consist in the act of deliberating 
upon and choosing between motives ; that delibe- 
ration, and that choice and judgment consequent 
upon it, have been regarded as the essence of free 
will. Not so at all. These are acts of the intel- 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



43 



lect, not of liberty ; it is before the intellect that 
the various motives of resolution and action, 
interests, passions, opinions, and such like, present 
themselves ; the intellect considers, compares, 
estimates, weighs, and judges them. This is a 
preparatory task, which precedes the act of voli- 
tion, but which does not in any way constitute it. 
When, after deliberation, man has taken full 
cognisance of the motives presented to him, and 
of their value, there takes place a process entirely 
new, and wholly different, that of free will ; man 
forms a resolution — that is to say, he commences 
a series of facts having their source in himself, of 
which he regards himself as the author ; and these 
are effectuated because he wills them ; they would 
have no existence did he not will it, and would be 
different if he desired to produce them otherwise. 
Now, let us imagine all remembrance of this 
process of intellectual deliberation obliterated, the 
motives so known and appreciated, forgotten ; 
concentrate your thought, and that of the man 
who takes a resolution, upon the moment when 



44 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



lie says, 'It is my will, therefore I shall do so ;' 
and ask yourself, ask too the man, whether he 
could not will and act otherwise. Without doubt, 
you will reply, as he will do, 'Assuredly,' and 
this it is that reveals the fact of liberty ; it con- 
sists wholly in the resolution which man takes 
after the deliberation is at an end ; it is the reso- 
lution that is the proper act of man, which is 
through him and through him alone ; a simple 
act, independent of all the facts which precede or 
accompany it, identical in the most varied circum- 
stances, always the same, whatever be its motives 
or its results. 

" At the same time that man feels himself free, 
and is conscious of the power of commencing by 
his own will alone a series of facts, he recognises 
that his will is subjected to the empire of a certain 
law, which takes different names, according to the 
circumstances to which it is applied — moral law, 

reason, good sense, &c Man is free, but 

according even to man's own way of thinking, his 
will is not arbitrary ; he may use it in an absurd, 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



45 



senseless, unjust, and culpable manner, and when- 
ever he uses it a certain rule must govern it. 
The observance of this rule is his duty, the task 
assigned to his liberty." 

It is that act of a will (that is to say of a will 
strictly brought back to its central and essential 
limits) acting freely in the intimate recesses 
of his being, which, in the case of disobedience to 
the law of duty, constitutes in man sin, and entails 
on him its responsibility. 

Is this responsibility exclusively personal, and 
limited to the author of the act, or communicated, 
so to say, by contagion, and transmitted in a cer- 
tain measure to his descendants ? 

I am still considering only actual appreciable 
facts, such as they produce and manifest them- 
selves in the moral life of the human race. 

We find the poetry and mythology of nearly all 
nations expressing the idea of an Utopian state of 
existence, referred to times remote and primitive, 
to which they assign different names, as the 
Golden Age, the Age of the Gods, and which they 



46 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



picture as an epoch when there existed no moral 
and physical evil in the world, — an era of peace, 
bliss, and innocence. This is the more remarkable, 
as it has no foundation, and finds no pretext in 
any tradition of historical times, however remote ; 
for from the commencement of history, from the 
time that we can discern any trace of facts at all 
precise and authentic, it is not the Golden Age, on 
the contrary, it is the Iron Age which appears — 
an epoch of violence and ignorance and barbarism, 
in which war and force are rampant, and which 
has not in effect the least resemblance to those 
beautiful dreams of ancient poetry. Without now 
seeking to establish any relation between these 
mythological dreams and the Biblical traditions ; 
or, for the moment, drawing from the Golden Age 
any argument in support of the Garden of Eden ; 
I merely point it out as a great fact, as evidence 
of a general instinct, so to say, of the human 
imagination. What is the meaning of this ? 
Whence comes this Utopia of innocence and bliss 
in the cradle of the human race ? To what does 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



47 



this idea of a primal time, without strife, without 
sin, and without pain, correspond ? 

But from this cradle of man and this primitive 
poetry, to revert to the present time, to real life, 
to the cradle of the infant, why is it that, apart 
from all personal affection, we so readily term 
infancy the age of innocence ? How is it that we 
find it so charming to give it this name, and regard 
it under this aspect ? Physical ill is already present, 
for it begins with the very beginning of life ; but 
moral ill has not yet appeared ; life has not yet 
brought to the soul its trials, nor called forth its 
failings, and the idea of the soul without spot or 
stain has for us an inexpressible attraction ; we 
feel a deep joy in witnessing innocence, or at least 
its image in the child, when we no longer see it 
around us, nor find it within ourselves. 

What means this universal instinct, which in 
the dreams of the imagination, as well as in the 
intimate scenes of domestic life, whether we turn 
in thought to the cradle of the human race or to 
that of the infant, leads us to regard innocence as 



48 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



the primitive and normal state of man, and makes 
us place in the spot where innocence resides that 
which some term Paradise, and others the Golden 
Age ? 

Manifestly between, the soul without spot and 
the soul tainted with evil, between the creature 
who is merely fallible and the creature who has 
sinned, there is a very great change of state, a 
distance immense, an abyss. We have a secret 
feeling of this deplorable change, of the fall into 
this abyss ; and it is without premeditation, by 
the mere impulse of our nature, that we suffer our 
thoughts to bear us far — far beyond that abyss, 
and to pause on the rapturous contemplation of a 
state anterior to the fall. Hence spring, and thus 
are explained, the power and the charm which the 
idea of innocence has for us ; absolute innocence 
we have never seen, but the idea is still vouch- 
safed to us; and so it appears to us in the cradle 
of the world, and in the cradle of the infant, and 
the pleasure is infinite which we derive from the 
ideal spectacle of purity which they each suggest. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



49 



Is this a pleasure foreign to all personal senti- 
ment, to all secret reference to ourselves, the 
pleasure, that is to say, of a simple spectator ? 
No : these impressions, which the picture of inno- 
cence awakens in us, are connected with and 
carry us back to ourselves ; this change in the 
state of man, that mysterious Past which has 
thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him, 
nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it — 
these were not the lot of the first man alone : the 
entire human race was, and remains, subject to 
them. Our present evil does not proceed solely 
from ourselves ; we have received it as a heritage 
before having brought it upon us as a penalty : 
we are not merely fallible beings, we are the 
children of a being who has sinned. 

How can we feel surprise at this inheritance 
of woe % Have we not daily the example and 
the spectacle before our eyes % It is an incon- 
testable and undisputed fact, that two elements 
enter into the moral life of man : on the one 
side, his innate dispositions, his natural and invo- 

E 



50 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



luntary inclinations, — on the other, his inmost 
and individual will. The natural inclinations of 
a man do not destroy his moral liberty nor en- 
slave his will, but they render its exercise more 
laborious and more difficult to him ; it is not a 
chain which he carries, it is a burden that he 
bears. Equally incontestable and undisputed is 
it that the natural dispositions of men are dif- 
ferent and unequally distributed ; no one is 
entirely exempt from evil inclinations ; every 
man is not only fallible, but prone to transgress, 
and prone not only to transgress, but to trans- 
gress in some particular direction or other. Nor 
can the fact be disputed, although appreciable 
with more difficulty, that the natural and special 
dispositions of the individual descend to him in 
a certain measure from his origin, and that 
parents transmit to their children such or such 
moral propensities just as they do such or such 
physical temperament, or such or such features. 
Hereditary transmission enters into the moral as 
well as the physical order of the world. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



51 



This inheritance must take effect, it has done 
so from the first days of mans existence upon 
earth, for man has been created complete in his 
whole nature. And whilst, at the same time as 
complete, he has been created fallible, I ask, who 
shall measure the distance between man fallible, 
but still without fault, and the first transgres- 
sion ? Who shall sound the depth of the fall, 
and of the change which it brought into the 
moral condition of its author ? "Who shall weigh 
the consequences of this change to the state 
and the moral dispositions of man's descendants ? 
To appreciate the extent and gravity of this 
awful fact, of this first appearance and this first 
heritage of moral evil, we have but one test, — 
the instinct we still preserve of a state of inno- 
cence, and of the immense space which this 
instinct irresistibly compels us to place between 
native innocence and man's first transgression ; 
but this test is unexceptionable ; it dimly reveals 
to us, in this fatal transformation, the whole infir- 
mity and responsibility of the human race. 

E 2 



52 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

An objection is raised to this as an injustice: 
how, it is said, can each man be responsible 
for a fault which he has not himself committed 
— for the transgression of another man, separated 
from himself by so many ages ? I consider this 
objection weak and frivolous. Such an objec- 
tion would attach to all the inequalities which 
exist among men, to the inequality of the 
destinies as well as that of the nature of man, 
to the inequality of his moral disposition as 
well as to that of his physical powers. The 
objection would attach to the solidarity of suc- 
cessive generations, and the controlling influence 
which the ideas, the acts, the destiny of each 
of them exert on the ideas, the acts, the destiny 
of those which follow it. The objection would 
attach to the ties which unite the child with its 
parents, and which are the cause of its some- 
times inheriting their evil dispositions, and some- 
times suffering for their faults. It is in short 
the general order of the world to which such an 
objection must apply ; it is the very existence 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



53 



of evil, and its unequal distribution in a manner 
wholly independent of individual merit which 
assumes the character of a monstrous iniquity. 
And when we come to this point, that we no 
longer refer the source of evil to the fault and 
the responsibility of man, placed here on earth 
in a scene and period of transition and of trial, 
see to what alternative we are brought We 
must either regard evil as natural, eternal, neces- 
sary, in the future as in the past, as the normal 
state of man and of the world ; that is to say, 
we must deny God, the creation, the Divine 
Providence, human morality, liberty, responsi- 
bility and hope ; or, on the other hand, it is to 
God Himself that we must impute evil, and whom 
we must render accountable. 

The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the 
human mind from this odious and unacceptable 
alternative : far from being in contradiction 
either with the history of humanity, or with 
the facts and instincts which constitute man's 
moral nature, this dogma admits, illustrates, and 



54 , THE CHRISTIAN KELIGIOK 

explains them. The fact of original sin presents 
nothing strange, nothing obscure ; it consists 
essentially in disobedience to the will of God, 
which will is the moral law of man. This dis- 
obedience, the sin of Adam, is an act com- 
mitted everywhere and every day, arising from 
the same causes, marked by the same characters, 
and attended by the same consequences as the 
Christian dogma assigns to it. At the present 
day, as in the Garden of EdeD, this act is occa- 
sioned by a thirst for absolute independence, the 
ambitious aspirings of curiosity and pride, or 
weakness in the face of temptation. At the pre- 
sent day, as in the Garden of Eden, it produces 
an immense change in the inmost state of man, 
a change, the mere idea of which seizes upon the 
human soul, and disturbs it to its very depths ; 
it transports man from the state of innocence 
to the state of sin. At the present day, as in 
the Garden of Eden, the act which produces this 
change involves and entails the responsibility 
not only of its author but of his descendants ; 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



55 



sin is contagious in time as in space, it is 
transmitted, as well as diffused. The Christian 
dogma exhibits the first man created fallible, 
but born innocent; innocent at the age of man, 
proud in the plenitude of his faculties, not the 
subject of any evil and fatal heritage. All at 
once, for the first time, of his own will, man 
disobeys God. Here lies Original Sin, the same 
in its nature as sin at the present day, for they 
both consist in disobedience to the law of God, 
but it is the first in date in the history of man's 
liberty, and the human source of that evil for 
which the Christian religion, whilst pointing it 
out, offers to man the remedy and the cure. 



IV. THE INCARNATION. 
All religions have given a prominent place to 
the problem of existence and the origin of evil ; 
all have attempted its solution. The good and 



50 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



the evil genius, Ormuzd and Ahriman among the 
Persians ; God the Creator, God the Preserver, 
and God the Destroyer — Brahma, Vishnu, and 
Siva — in India ; the Titans overwhelmed by the 
thunderbolts of Jove while scaling Olynipus ; Pro- 
metheus chained to the rock for having snatched 
fire from heaven ; all are so many hypotheses to 
explain the conflict between good and evil, be- 
tween order and disorder in the world and in 
man. But all these hypotheses are complicated, 
confused, and encumbered with chimeras and 
fables ; all attribute the derivation of evil to 
incongruous causes, none assign any term to the 
conflict, nor find a remedy for the evil. The 
Christian religion alone clearly states and effec- 
tually solves the question ; it alone imputes to 
man himself, and to him alone, the origin of evil ; 
it alone represents God as intervening to raise 
man from his fall, and to save him from his 
peril. 

In the course of the sixth and fifth centuries 
before the Christian era, a great fact appears in 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



57 



history ; a breath of reform, religions, moral and 
social, arises, and spreads from east to west, among 
all the nations then at all progressing in the path 
of civilization. Notwithstanding the uncertainties 
of chronology, it may be said, according to the 
most recent and accurate researches, that Con- 
fucius in China, the Buddha Cakya-Mouni in 
India, Zoroaster in Persia, Pythagoras and Socrates 
in Greece, are all included in the limits of this ' 
epoch;* men as dissimilar as they are celebrated, 
but who have all, in different ways and in 
unequal degrees, undertaken a great work of re- 
forming both the men and the social institutions 
of their times. Confucius was above all a prac- 
tical moralist, skilled in observation, counsel, and 
discipline ; Buddha Cakya-Mouni, a dreamer, and 
a mystical and popular preacher ; Zoroaster, a 

* These researches give the following dates : — 1. Confucius, 
from 551 to 478 b.c. ; 2. Zoroaster, from 564 to 487, or from 
589 to 512 b. c. ; 3. Buddha Cakya-Mouni, in the seventh and 
sixth centuries B.C. (he died, according to Burnouf, 543 B.C.); 
4. Pythagoras, from 580 to 500 B.C. ; 5. Socrates, 470 to 400 or 
309 b.c. 



53 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



legislator, religions and political ; Pythagoras and 
Socrates, philosophers, bent npon instmcting the 
distinguished bands of disciples whom they 
gathered aronnd them. There is no doubt, not- 
withstanding the trials of their life, that neither 
power nor glory amongst their contemporaries 
was wanting to them. Confucius and Zoroaster 
were the favourites and counsellors of kings. 
Buddha Cakya-Mouni, himself the son of a king, 
became the idol of innumerable multitudes. Py- 
thagoras and Socrates formed schools and pupils 
who were an honour to the human mind. By 
their personal genius and by the excellence of 
some of their ideas and actions, these men have 
ensured themselves the admiration of all pos- 
terity. Did they act up to their teachings, and 
accomplish what they attempted ? Did they 
really change the moral and social condition of 
nations % Did they cause humanity to make any 
great progress, and open to it horizons which it 
had not before known % By no means. What- 
ever fame attaches to the names of these men, 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



50 



whatever influence they may have exerted, what- 
ever trace of their passage may have remained, 
they rather appeared to have power than really 
to possess it ; they agitated the surface far more 
than they stirred the depths ; they did not draw 
nations out of the beaten tracks in which they 
had lived. They did not transform souls. In 
considering the facts at large, and notwith- 
standing the political and material revolutions 
which they underwent, China after Confucius, 
India after Buddha, Persia after Zoroaster, Greece 
after Pythagoras and Socrates, followed in the 
same ways, retained the same propensities, as 
before. Still more, among these very different 
nations, stagnation was only ibe succeeded by 
decay. Where are these nations at the present 
day, more than two thousand years after the 
appearance of these glorious characters in their 
history 1 What great progress, what salutary 
changes, have been effected \ What are they 
in comparison and in contact with Christian 
nations \ Outside of Christianity there have been 



60 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



grand spectacles of activity and force, brilliant 
phenomena of genius and virtue, generous at- 
tempts at reform, learned philosophical systems, 
and beautiful mythological poems ; no real pro- 
found or fruitful regeneration of humanity and of 
society. 

A few ages only after these barren efforts 
among the great nations of the world, Jesus 
Christ appears among a small, obscure people, 
weak and despised. He Himself is weak and 
despised in the midst of his people ; He neither 
possesses nor seeks any social power, any tempo- 
ral means of action and of success; He collects 
around Him only disciples weak and despised as 
Himself. Not only are they weak and despised, 
they proclaim it themselves, and, far from being 
troubled at this, they glory in it, and derive from 
it confidence. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians : 
" And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not 
with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring 
unto you the testimony of God. For I deter- 
mined not to know any thing among you, save 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



61 



Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with 
you in weakness, and in fear, and in much 

trembling Therefore I take pleasure in 

infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in per- 
secutions, in distresses for Christ's sake ; for when 
I am weak, then I am strong."* And in truth, 
Jesus Christ, the Master of St. Paul, is strong 
in his sufferings, and imparts his strength to his 
disciples ; from his cross, He accomplishes what 
erewhile, in Asia and Europe, princes and philo- 
sophers, the powerful of the earth, and sages, 
attempted without success ; He changes the moral 
state and the social state of the world ; He pours 
into the souls of men new enlightenment and new 
powers ; for all classes, for all human conditions, 
He prepares destinies before his advent unknown; 
He liberates them at the same time that He lays 
down rules for their guidance ; He quickens them 
and stills them ; He places the divine law and 
human liberty face to face, and yet still in 
harmony ; He offers an effectual remedy for the 

* 1 Cor. ii. 1—3 ; 2 Cor. xii. 10. 



62 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



evil which weighs upon humanity ; to sin He 
opens the path of salvation, to unhappiness the 
door of hope. 

Whence comes this power 1 "What are its 
source and its nature ? How did those who 
were its witnesses and instruments think and 
speak of it at the moment when it was mani- 
fested ? 

They all, unanimously, saw in Jesus Christ, 
God ; most of them, from the first moment, 
suddenly moved and enlightened by his presence 
and his words ; some, with rather more surprise 
and hesitation, but soon penetrated and convinced 
in their turn. " When Jesus came into the coasts 
of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, say- 
ing, Whom do men say that I the Son of man 
am ? And they said, Some say that thou art 
John the Baptist ; some, Elias ; and others, Jere- 
mias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto 
them, But whom say ye that I am ? And Simon 
Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, 
the son of the living God. And Jesus answered 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



G3 



and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon 
Barjona ; for flesh and blood hath not revealed 
it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven."* 
Another day, meeting with a similar instance of 
doubt, J esus says to Thomas, " If ye had known 
me, ye should have known my Father also : and 
from henceforth ye know him, and have seen 
him. Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the 
Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, 
Have I been so long time with you, and yet 
hast thou not known me, Philip ? he that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father." t 

It has been remarked, that there are certain 
variations in the language of the Apostles, and 
certain shades of difference in their leading im- 
pressions ; and this is indeed true : they call Jesus 
Christ at one time the Son of God, at another the 
Son of Man ; they regard Him and represent Him 
now under his divine aspect, at another under 
his human aspect ; they do not present exactly 
the same image of Him ; they do not all equally 

* Matt. xvi. 13— IT. f John, xiv. 7—9, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



dwell upon the same traits of his nature, or the 
same facts of his earthly life. St. Matthew is 
more a narrator and moralist ; it is he who 
relates with fuller details the birth and child- 
hood of Jesus Christ, and who gives at the 
greatest length the Sermon on the Mount. St. 
John is more in the habit of contemplating and 
depicting the divine nature of Jesus Christ and 
his relation to God : " In the beginning was 
the Word, and the Word was with God, and 
the Word was God. . . . And the Word 
was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us, and we 
beheld his glory, the glory as of the only- 
begotten of the Father, full of grace and 
truth. ... No man hath seen God at any 
time ; the only-begotten Son, which is in the 
bosom of the Father, he hath declared him."* 
It is also St. John who relates the testimony of 
the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, answering 
to those who had said to him that all men come 
to Jesus Christ: "Ye yourselves bear me wit- 

* John, i. 1, 14, 18. 



SECOXD MEDITATION. 



65 



ness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but that 
I am sent before him. . . . He that cometh 
from above is above all. . . . He whom 
God hath sent speaketh the words of God : for 
God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto 
him. . . . The Father loveth the Son, and 
hath given all things into his hand/'* St. Paul 
is more systematic, and enters more fully into 
the questions and principles of the Christian 
doctrine, and he regards the divinity of Jesus 
Christ as the first of these principles. He writes 
to the Philippians : "Let this mind be in you, 
which was also in Christ Jesus : who, being in 
the form of God, thought it no usurpation to 
be equal with God : but made himself of no 
reputation, and took upon him the form of a 
servant, and was made in the likeness of men : 
and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled 
himself, and became obedient unto death, even 
the death of the cross." t . . . . It is he 

* Jolm iii. 28, 31, 34, and 35. 

% Philippians ii. 5 — 8. I have given this verse in. Oster- 



06 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



"who is the image of the invisible God, the 
first-born of every creature : for by him were 

wald's translation, which is also that of the Vulgate ; but my 
son Guillaume, who is following out a careful course of study of 
Latin and Greek philology in sacred and profane literature, 
reminds me that the text of this passage presents a difficulty 
which furnished a field for the labours of Erasmus, Cameron, 
Grotius, Meric Casaubon, in the sixteenth century, as well as 
many others before and after them. The Greek word apira.yiJ.6s 
admits of two meanings, an active and a passive sense — it may 
designate the action of ravishing, of carrying off by force, or the 
object carried off — the act of depredation, or the spoil. Sub- 
stantives derived from verbs frequently waver between these 
two acceptations, and the word apirayf], which is merely another 
form of apirayix6s, is unquestionably a case in point. .ZEschylus, 
Euripides, Herodotus, have employed it in the first sense ; 
^Eschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, and Polybius in the second 
sense. Now, in the passage of St. Paul, accordingly as one or 
the other sense is adopted, these words must either be translated 
thus : " He did not consider it a usurpation to be equal to 
God;" or thus, "He did not display as a trophy his equality 
to God ; " that is to say : He did not display His equality 
with God as the conquerors of the earth display the spoils and 
booty which they have amassed ; He did not make use of His 
divinity to reign, to triumph, to pride himself in it ; He was not 
the Messiah whom the carnal Jews expected, a visible king and 
victorious in arms ; but, on the contrary, " he humbled him- 
self, and took upon him the form of a servant," etc., etc. This 
second interpretation seems more probable ; the reasoning on 
which it is founded is thus more connected and flowing ; and at 
the same time, it leaves the doctrine of the Apostle intact ; it 
changes nothing in his conception or his conclusions. In this 
passage, as in many others, St. Paul likewise afiirms the divinity 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



67 



all things created, that are in heaven, and that 
are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they 
be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or 
powers : all things were created by him, and for 
him : and he is before all things, and by him all 
things consist."* St. Peter and St. John, in their 
Epistles, speak in the same terms as St. Paul. 
St. Peter says, " We have not followed cunningly 
devised fables, when we made known unto you 
the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he 
received from God the Father honour and glory, 
when there came such a voice to him from the 
excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in 

of the Saviour whom he announces to men ; and it is from this 
majesty, subjected to a voluntary humiliation, veiled under the 
form of a servant, obedient unto the death of the cross, that He 
presents an august example and an imperative lesson for Chris- 
tians of humility and mutual support. It is thus that this 
interpretation has been admitted and defended by two eminent 
men, a scholar of the sixteenth and a theologian of the nine- 
teenth century, both of whom were strongly attached to the 
dogma of the divinity of Jesus Christ — I allude to Meric Casau- 
bon (De Verborum Usu, pp. 138 — 146, at the end of the letters 
of his father), and M A. Vinet (Homiletique, p. ] 16). 
* Colos. i. 15—17. 

F 2 



68 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



whom 1 am well pleased ; hear ye him.'' * St. 
J ohn writes : " Whosoever clenieth the Son, the 
same hath not the Father ; but he that acknow- 
ledged the Son hath the Father also/ v t "Hereby 
know ye the Spirit of God : every Spirit that 
eonfesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is 
of God ; and every spirit that eonfesseth not that 
Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God." I 
Such is the language of the Apostles ; such are, 
at the same time, its shades of variance and its 
harmony. They have all evidently the same con- 
ception of Jesus Christ, they have all the same 
faith in Him. St. Matthew, as well as St. John, 
St. Peter and St. Paul, alike regard Jesus Christ 
as at once God and man, the representative of 
God on earth, and the Mediator between God and 
men — come from God, and re-ascended unto Him 
as the source and centre of His being. The dogma 
of the Incarnation, that is to say, of the divinity of 
Jesus Christ, pervades the Holy Scriptures — the 

* 2 Pet. . 16, 17. t 1 John ii. 23. 

% 1 John iv. 2, 3. 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



69 



Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of 
the Apostles, the writings of the first Fathers. 
It is the conrrnon and fixed basis, the source and 
essence of the Christian faith. 

This was affirmed and declared by Jesus Christ 
himself. What His disciples believed and related 
of Him, is what He himself told them of himself, 
as well as what they themselves witnessed and 
thought of Him : " All things are delivered unto 
me of my Father : and no man knoweth the Son, 
but the Father : neither knoweth any man the 
Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the 
Son will reveal him/'* — "I and my Father are 
one."t And when He approaches the term of His 
mission, when, after having announced to His 
disciples that the hour was coming when they 
would be dispersed, each going his own way, 
leaving Him alone, Jesus Christ raises His thoughts 
to God and says, " Father, the hour is come ; 
glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify 
thee : as thou hast given him power over all flesh, 

* Matt. xi. 27. t John x. 30. 



70 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



that he should give eternal life to as many as thou 
hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they 
might know thee the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee 
on the earth : I have finished the work which 
thou gavest me to do. And now, Father, glorify 
thou me with thine own self with the glory which 
I had with thee before the world was. I have 
manifested thy name unto the men which thou 
gavest me out of the world : thine they were, and 
thou gavest them me ; and they have kept thy 
word. Now they have known that all things 
whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For 
I have given unto them the words which thou 
gavest me ; and they have received them, and 
have known surely that I came out from thee, and 
they have believed that thou didst send me. I 
pray for them : I pray not for the world, but for 
them which thou hast given me ; for they are 
thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are 
mine ; and I am glorified in them. And now I 
am no more in the world, but these are in the 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



71 



world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep 
through thine own name those whom thou hast 
given me, that they may be one, as we are."* 

I might multiply these texts ; but these surely 
suffice to show that the words of Jesus Christ in 
relation to himself, and those of His Apostles, are in 
perfect unison ; He speaks of himself as they speak 
of Him ; He qualifies himself as they qualify Him ; 
He calls God His " Father," as His disciples call 
Him "the Son of God." He has the same faith 
in himself, in His nature, and in His mission, as 
St. Matthew, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul had 
in Him. 

It is a great source of error, in the study of 
facts, not to know how to stop at their general 
and essential features, and, losing sight of these, to 
give prominence to partial and secondary features. 
On the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ, 
that fundamental principle of the Christian religion, 
the precise meaning and import of such or such a 
word may be disputed ; such or such an expression 

* John xvii. 1 — 11. 



V2 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



may be thought an interpolation, and so eliminated 
in any particular Gospel, in any particular Epistle ; 
nevertheless there -will always remain infinitely 
more than sufficient evidence of the fact that those 
who at the present day believe in the divinity of 
Jesus Christ, believe simply what the Apostles 
believed and said, and that the Apostles them- 
selves only believed and said, nearly nineteen cen- 
turies ago, what Jesus Christ himself said to them. 

The opponents of the dogma of the Incarna- 
tion and of the divinity of Jesus Christ disregard 
equally man and history, the complex elen: .its 
of human nature, and the meaning of the great 
facts which mark the religious life of the human 
race. 

What is man himself, but an incomplete and 
imperfect incarnation of God ? The materialists 
who deny the soul, and the naturalists who deny 
creation, are alone consistent in rejecting the Chris- 
tian dogma. All who believe in the distinction of 
spirit and matter, who do not believe that man is 
the resuit of the fermentation of matter, or of the 



SECOND MEDITATION. 73 

transformation of species, are constrained to admit 
the presence in human nature of the divine ele- 
ment, and they must necessarily accept these 
words in Genesis : " God created man in his own 
image that is to say, they must acknowledge 
the presence of God in frail and fallible humanity. 

I open the histories of all religions, of all 
mythologies, the most refined as well as the 
grossest ; I find at every step the idea and the 
assertion of the Divine Incarnation. Brahman- 
ism, Buddhism, Paganism, all faiths, all religious 
idol L ries, abound in incarnations of every kind 
and date, primitive or successive, connected with 
this or that historical event, adapted to explain 
this or that fact, to satisfy this or that human 
propensity. It is the natural and universal 
instinct of men to picture to themselves the 
action of God upon the human race under the 
form of the incarnation of God in man. 

Like all religious instincts, that of the belief 
in the Divine Incarnation may engender, and has 
engendered, the most absurd superstitions, the 



74 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



most extravagant hypotheses. In the same way 
as the natural faith in God has been the source 
of all idolatries, so the tendency to incarnate God 
in man has given rise to, and admitted, every 
kind of strange imagining and spurious tradition. 

Are we then to pronounce all divine incarna- 
tion false, every tradition of it spurious ? Bather 
let us say that it proceeds from the infirmity of 
! the human mind, if we see realities and mere 
chimeras, truths and errors, in such close 
proximity, if we find them calling one another 
by the same names and unceasingly confounding 
one another's attributes. The pretended incar- 
nation of Brahma, or of Buddha, proves no more 
against the divinity of Jesus Christ than the 
adoration of idols proves against the existence 
of God. Jesus Christ, God and Man, has cha- 
racteristics which appertain to Him alone. These 
have founded His power and. occasioned the 
success of His works, a power and a success 
which belong to Him alone, It is not a 
human reformer, but God himself, who, through 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



75 



Jesus Christ, has accomplished what no human 
reformer has ever accomplished, or even con- 
ceived, — the reform of the moral and social 
condition of the world, the regeneration of the 
human soul, and the solution of the problems of 
human destiny. It is by these signs, by these 
results, that the divinity of Jesus Christ is mani- 
fested. How was the Divine Incarnation accom- 
plished in man ? Here, as in the union of the 
soul and the body, as in the creation, arises the 
mystery ; but if we cannot fathom the reason 
of it, the fact not the less exists. When this 
fact has taken the form of dogma, theology has 
sought to explain it. In my opinion, this was 
a mistake ; theology has obscured the fact in 
developing and commenting upon it. It is the 
fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes 
the Christian faith, and which rises above all 
definitions and all theological controversies. To 
disregard this fact — to deny the divinity of J esus 
Christ — is to deny, to overthrow the Christian 
religion, which would never have been what it 



70 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



is, and would never have accomplished what it 
has, but that the Divine Incarnation was its 
principle, and Jesus Christ — God and Man — its 
author. 



V. THE REDEMPTION. 

I enter into the sanctuary of the Christian 
faith. 

God has done more than manifest himself in 
Jesus Christ. ' He has done more than place upon 
the earth and before men His own living image, 
the type of sanctity and the model of life. The 
Creator has accomplished, through Jesus Christ, 
toward man, His creature, an act of His benefi- 
cence and at the same time of His sovereign 
power. Jesus Christ is not only God made man 
to spread the divine light upon men ; He is God 
made man to conquer and efface in man moral 
evil, the fruit of the sin of man. He brings not 
only light and law, but pardon and salvation. 
And it is at the price of His own suffering, of 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



77 



His own sacrifice, that He brings these to them. 
He is the type of self-devotion at the same time 
as of sanctity. He has submitted to be a victim 
in order to be a saviour. The Incarnation leads 
to the Cross, and the Cross to the Eedemption. 

Here are the supreme dogma and mystery. 
Here are revealed plainly the sense and the im- 
port of Christianity. By what ways did Jesus 
Christ penetrate the human soul to accomplish 
this great work \ How did He win the human 
soul to the Christian faith, in order to snatch it 
from evil and to save it \ 

When man fails in the duty of which he 
recognises the law, — when he commits the wrong 
which he is bound to shun, — when, after sin, 
repentance arises within him, and a sense of the 
necessity of expiation is soon joined with this 
sentiment of repentance, the moral instinct of 
man teaches that repentance does not suffice to 
efface the fault, and that it requires to be 
expiated : reparation supposes suffering. 

And when the religious sentiment is joined to 



78 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



the moral sentiment, — when man believes in God, 
and sees in Him the author and dispenser of the 
moral law, he regards himself as guilty of trans- 
gression toward God whom he has disobeyed, he 
feels the need of being pardoned and of being 
restored to the favour of the Sovereign Master 
whom he has offended. 

Among all nations, in all religions, under all 
social forms, these two instincts — as to the 
necessity of expiation to ensue upon the fault, 
and the necessity of pardon to follow the trans- 
gression — appear natural and iuherent in the 
human soul. They have been at all times and 
in all places, the source of a multitude of beliefs 
and practices ; some pure and touching, others 
foolish and odious : these may all be briefly com- 
prised in the single expression, sacrifices. The his- 
tories of all nations, barbarous or civilized, ancient 
or modern, teem with sacrificial rites of every 
description, whether they be of a nature gross 
or mystical, of a performance mild or bloody ; 
rites invented and celebrated either to expiate 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



79 



the sins of man, or to appease the anger of God 
and regain His favour. 

Nor is this all ; we have here to note another 
moral fact, not less real although it seems 
stranger to the eyes of superficial reason. Man- 
kind has believed that a fault might be expiated 
by another than its author, that innocent victims 
might be efficaciously offered up to influence God, 
and to save the guilty. This belief has led to 
sacrifices no less absurd than atrocious : the pre- 
tended expiation has become an additional crime : 
it has at the same time been also the source of 
heroic acts and sublime examples of self-devotion. 
Both the domestic records of families and the 
public histories of nations have furnished us 
with admirable instances of innocence voluntarily 
offering itself as a sacrifice, taking upon itself 
the penalty, the suffering, the death, to expiate 
the sin of others, and to win from Divine Justice 
— now satisfied — the pardon of the offender. 

And are we then to regard this merely as a 
pious, a generous illusion, a devotedness as vain 



80 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



as admirable ? Yes, such is the view that all those 
must adopt who believe neither in Providence 
nor prayer, nor in the existence of any efficacious 
relation between the actions of man and the pur- 
poses of God ; no solidarity between men, no 
connection between the sacrifice of him who 
practises the act of self-devotion, and the destiny 
of him who is its object. But those who have 
faith in the living God, in His continued presence, 
and His never-sleeping providence, those who 
believe that nothing in man, whether it be good 
or whether it be evil, is in vain, that every moral 
act bears its fruit visible or invisible, immediate 
or remote, such as these cannot fail to feel, to 
have, as it were, a presentiment, that in such self- 
sacrifice of the innocent for the salvation of the 
guilty, there exists a mysterious virtue. The 
secret of this it may not be given them to fathom, 
but it nevertheless gives life in their bosom to the 
hope that such sublime devotion will not fail of 
its object. 

And now, to pass from this feeling, and from 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



81 



the acts of man, whose reality no one can dispute, 
to the corresponding dogmas of Christianity, let 
me, by the side of these acts of devotedness and 
self-sacrifice of the human creature in his inno- 
cence seeking to atone for the sins of the human 
creature who is guilty, place the self-devotion and 
the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Man-God, 
tendered to ransom from sin the race of man- 
kind and to open to it the way of salvation ; who 
is not struck by this sublime analogy 1 What 
connection and harmony between the purest, the 
most generous, instincts of the human soul, and 
the dogma of God's Kedemption \ I touch upon 
none of the questions, I enter into none of the 
controversies which have sprung up with respect 
to this dogma of Eedemption ; I do not weigh 
with a view to compare faith and works, nor do I 
essay to assign the part due to divine grace or to 
human virtue ; I do not define or seek to number 
the elect, but I pause upon the fact itself of the 
Kedemption by Jesus Christ, the fact upon which 
the dogma itself reposes. All that the most 



82 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



renowned heroes, the most glorious saints of 
humanity have striven to accomplish, in order to 
expiate the sins of any creature or any nation, 
Jesus Christ the Elect of God, the Son of God, 
the God-Man, came to effect for all mankind, by 
means of incomparable sorrow, humiliation, and 
sufferings. And, as was affirmed by St. Paul in 
the first century, and by Bossuet in the seven- 
teenth, this very suffering, this humiliation, this 
martyrdom of Jesus Christ, have constituted 
his victory and his empire. And I would ask, 
what other spectacle than that of God made man 
to constitute himself victim — made victim to 
become the saviour — could have excited in the 
soul of mankind those outbursts of admiration, of 
respect, and of love, that ardent, invincible, and 
contagious faith, of which the Apostles and the 
primitive Christians have left us the evidences and 
the example 1 It was requisite that the victim 
and the sacrifice should be equal to the work. 
That work was the Christian religion, that incom- 
parable system of facts, dogmas, precepts, pro- 



SECOND MEDITATION. 



S3 



mises, which, in the midst of all the doubts and 
all the controversies of the mind of man, have for 
nineteen centuries afforded satisfaction and solu- 
tion to those aspirings of the human race, which 
nature prompts, whether they assume the form 
of religious instincts or religious problems. 



THIED MEDITATION. 

THE SUPERNATURAL. 

To a system so grand, and in such profound 
harmony with mans own nature, an objection 
is made which is thought decisive; that system 
proclaims the Supernatural, has the Supernatural 
for its principle and foundation. It is objected 
that the Supernatural itself has no existence. 

This objection is not novel, but it has at this 
moment in appearance assumed a more serious 
and formidable shape than ever. It is in the 
name of science itself, of all the human sciences, 
of the physical sciences, historical science, philo- 
sophical science, that the pretension is made that 
is to reduce the Supernatural to a nonentity, and 
to banish it from the world and from man. 

The reverence that I feel for science is infinite. 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



So 



I would have it as free and unshackled as I would 
desire to see it honoured. But I would at the 
same time like to see it deal somewhat more 
rigorously and logically with itself. I would like 
to see it less exclusively absorbed by its own 
peculiar labours and occupations, its momentary 
successes ; more careful not to forget or omit any 
of the ideas or any of the facts which bear upon 
the subject with which it deals, and for which in 
its solution it has still to account. 

In whatever quarter, at this day, the wind may 
be, the abolition of the Supernatural is a difficult 
enterprise, for the belief in the Supernatural is a 
fact natural, primitive, universal, constant in the 
life and history of the human race. We may 
interrogate mankind in all times and places, in 
all states of society and degrees of civilization, 
we find it always and everywhere spontaneously 
believing in facts and causes beyond the sphere 
of this palpable world, of this living piece of 
mechanism termed nature. In vain do we ex- 
tend, explain, amplify nature itself; the instinct 



86 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



of man, the instinct of human masses, has never 
suffered that nature to confine it : it has always 
sought and seen something beyond. 

It is this belief — instinctive, and hitherto inde- 
structible — which is qualified as a radical error; 
this universal and enduring fact in man s history 
it is which men seek to abolish. They go farther ; 
they affirm that it is already abolished — that the 
people no longer believe in the Supernatural, and 
that any attempt to bring them back to it would- 
be vain. Incredible conceit of man ! "What, 
because in a corner of the world in one day 
among ages brilliant progress may have been 
made in natural and historical science — because in 
the name of the sciences, and in brilliant books, 
the Supernatural has been combated, they pro- 
claim the Supernatural vanquished, abolished ; and 
we hear the judgment pronounced, not merely in 
the name of the learned, but of the people ! Have 
you then completely forgotten, or have you never 
thoroughly comprehended, humanity and the 
history of humanity \ Do you ignore absolutely 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



87 



what the people really is, and what all those 
nations are that cover the surface of the earth ? 
Have you never then penetrated into those mil- 
lions of souls in which the belief in the Super- 
natural is and abides, present and active even 
when the words which move their hps disown it ? 
Are you then unconscious of the immense dis- 
tance which there is between the depths and the 
surface of those souls, between the variable breaths 
which only ruffle the minds of men, and the im- 
mutable instincts which preside over their very 
being \ True, there are, in our days, amongst 
the people, many fathers, mothers, children, who 
believe themselves incredulous, and mock scorn- 
fully at miracles ; but follow them in the inti- 
macy of their homes, amongst the trials of their 
lives, how do these parents act, when their child 
is ill, those farmers when their crops are threat- 
ened, those sailors when they float upon the 
waters a prey to the tempest 1 They elevate 
their eyes to heaven, they burst forth in prayer, 
they invoke that Supernatural power said by you 



88 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



to be abolished in their very thought. By their 
spontaneous and irresistible acts they give to 
your words and to their own a striking dis- 
avowal. 

But to advance a step towards you, admitted that 
the faith in the Supernatural is abolished ; let us 
enter together that society and those classes to 
whom this moral ruin is a triumph and a vaunt. 
What then ensues \ In the place of God's mira- 
cles, man's miracles make their appearance. They 
are searched for, they are called for; men are 
found to invent them, and to contrive them to be 
recognised by thousands of beholders. It is not 
necessary to go either far in time or wide in 
space to see the Supernatural of Superstition 
raising itself in the place of the Supernatural 
of Eeligion, and Credulity hurrying to meet 
Falsehood half-way. 

But away with these unhealthy paroxysms 
of humanity ; and to return to its sober and 
enduring history. We will admit that the 
instinctive belief in the Supernatural has been 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



89 



the source and abides the foundation of all reli- 
gions, of religion in the most general sense of 
the word, and of essential religion. The most 
serious, at the same time the most perplexed, of 
the thinkers who in our days have approached 
the subject, M. Edmond Scherer, saw plainly 
enough that that was the question at issue, and 
he has so put it in the third of his " Conversa- 
tions Theologiques," noble yet sad imaging forth 
of the fermentation in his own ideas and the 
struggles which they occasion in his soul. " The 
Supernatural is not a something external to 
religion," says one of the two speakers between 
whom M. Scherer supposes the discussion, "it 
is religion itself." "No," says the other, "the 
Supernatural is not the peculiar element of reli- 
gion, but rather of superstition : the Supernatural 
fact has no relation with the human soul, for it 
is the essence of the Supernatural that it goes 
beyond all those conditions which constitute 
credibility ; its essence indeed is the being anti- 
human" The discussion continues and becomes 



90 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

animated : the contrary nature of the perplexi- 
ties experienced by the two speakers becomes 
manifest. " Perhaps," says the Kationalist, " the 
Supernatural was a necessary form of religion for 
ill cultivated minds : but rightly or wrongly, our 
modern civilization rejects miracles ; without posi- 
tive denial, it remains indifferent to them. Even 
the preacher knows not how to deal with them; 
the more he is in earnest, the more his Christian 
feeling has inwardness and vitality, the more 
does the miracle also disappear from his teaching. 
Miracles formerly constituted the great force of 
the sermon, at the present day what are they 
but a secret source of embarrassment % Every- 
body feels vaguely when confronted by the mar- 
vellous accounts in our sacred volumes, what he 
feels when confronted by the Legends of the 
Saints ; it is impossible for that to be religion, 
it is only its superfcetation." "It is true," ex- 
claims with sorrow the hesitating Christian, " we 
believe no longer in miracles ; you might have 
added that neither do we any more believe in 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



91 



God himself; the two things go together. We 
hear much now-a-days of Christian Spiritualism — 
of the religion of the conscience, and you yourself 
seem to see that men in giving up miracles are 
making progress in religion. Ah ! why is it that 
the intimate experience of my own heart cannot 
express itself in a forcible protest against any 
such opinion \ Whenever I find my faith in 
miraculous agency vacillating within me, the 
image of my God seems to be fading away from 
my eyes : He ceases to be for me God the free, 
the living, the personal ; the God with whom 
the soul converses, as with a master and friend ; 
and this holy dialogue once interrupted, what 
is left us % How does life become sad ? how 
does it lose its illusions ? Eeduced to the 
satisfaction of mere physical wants, to eat, to 
drink, to sleep, to make money, deprived of all 
horizon, how puerile does our maturity appear, 
how sorrowful our old age, how meaningless our 
anxieties ! 

"No more mystery, no more innocence, no more 



92 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



infinity, no longer any heaven above our heads, 
no more poesy. Ah ! be sure : the incredulity 
which rejects the miracle has a tendency to 
unpeople heaven, and to disenchant the earth. 
The Supernatural is the natural sphere of the 
soul. It is the essence of its faith, of its hope, 
of its love. I know how specious criticism is, 
how victorious its arguments often appear ; but I 
know one thing besides, and perhaps I might 
here even appeal to your own testimony ; in 
ceasing to believe in what is miraculous, the soul 
finds that it has lost the secret of divine life ; 
henceforth it is urged downwards towards the 
abyss, soon it lies on the earth, and not seldom 
in the dirt." 

In his turn the disbeliever in the Super- 
natural is troubled and saddened : " Listen," he 
says : " the history of humanity seems to be some- 
times moving in obedience to the following 
scheme. The world begins with religion, and, 
referring all phenomena to a first cause, it sees 
God everywhere. Then comes philosophy, which, 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



93 



having discovered the connection of secondary 
causes, and the laws of their operation, makes a 
corresponding deduction from the direct inter- 
vention of divinity, and then founding itself 
upon the idea of necessity (for it is only neces- 
sity which falls within the domain of science, 
and science is in fact but the knowledge of what 
is necessary) ; philosophy tends in its very fun- 
damental principle to exclude God from the 
world. It does more ; it finishes by denying 
human liberty as it has denied God. The reason 
is evident : liberty is a cause beyond the sphere 
of the necessary connection of causes, a first 
cause, a cause which serves as cause to itself: 
and from that moment philosophy, unequal to 
any explanation, feels itself disposed to deny that 
first cause. A philosophy true to itself will ever 
be fatalistic. For from that moment philosophy 
corrupts and destroys itself. When it has no 
other God than the universe, no other man than 
the chief of the mammalia, what is it but a mere 
system of Zoology % Zoology constitutes the whole 



94 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



science of the epoch of the Materialists, and to 
speak plainly, that is our position at the present 
clay. But materialism can never be the be-all 
and the end-all of the human race. Corrupt and 
enervated, society is passing through immense 
catastrophes, is failing in ruins ; the iron harrow 
of Eevolution is breaking up mankind like the 
clods of the field ; in the bloody furrows germi- 
nate new races ; the soul in the agony of its dis- 
tress believes once more ; it resumes its faith in 
virtue, it finds again the language of prayer. 
To the age of the Eenaissance succeeded that of 
the Eeformation ; to the Germany of Frederick 
the Great, the Germany of 1812. So faith 
springs up for ever and ever out of its ashes. 
Ah, that I must add it, humanity rises again but 
to resume the march which I have just described. 
But can it be said of it besides, that like this 
Globe of ours it is making any movement in 
advance whilst it is so turning round itself, and 
if it does so advance, towards what is it gravi- 
tating \ 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



95 



' Whither, whither, Lord, inarches the earth in the heavens V " * 

But it is not towards heaven that the earth 
would march if it followed the path in which 
the adversaries of the Supernatural are impel- 
ling it. It is this pecuharity, they say, of the 
Supernatural, that being] incredible, it is in its 
very essence anti-human. Now it is precisely to 
something not anti-human but superhuman that 
the human soul aspires, and there seeks to realize 
these aspirations in the Supernatural. We should 
be never weary of repeating it ; the whole finite 
world in its entirety, with all its facts and all its 
laws, comprising indeed man himself, suffices not 
for the soul of man ; it requires something grander 
and more perfect for the subject of its contem- 
plation, the object of its love ; it desires to fix its 
trust in something more stable; to lean upon 
something less fragile. This supreme and sublime 
ambition it is to which religion, in its widest 
sense, gives birth and supplies nourishment ; and 

* Melange de Critique Religiense, par Edmond Scherer — 
Conversations Theologiques, pp. 169 — 187. 



93 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



this supreme and sublime ambition it is also that 
the religion of Christ more particularly responds 
to and satisfies. Let those, therefore, who flatter 
themselves that although abolishing the belief in 
the Supernatural, they leave Christians- still Chris- 
tians, undeceive themselves ; what they are abo- 
lishing, destroying, is very religion, for their 
arguments assail all religion in general, and 
Christianity in particular. It may be that they 
do not inflict upon themselves all this evil, and 
that in retaining a sincere religious sentiment they 
really believe themselves nearly Christians ; the 
soul struggles against the errors of the thought, 
and a moral suicide is a rare spectacle. But the 
evil even in spreading unveils more plainly its 
nature and increases in intensity; besides men, in 
masses, draw from error far more logical con- 
elusions than the man ever did in whom the error 
had its origin. The people are not the learned, 
neither are they philosophers, and only once suc- 
ceed in destroying in them all faith in the Super- 
natural, and you may consider it certain that the 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



97 



faith in Christ must have previously disappeared. 
Have you well weighed all this ? Have you 
pictured to yourself what a man, what mankind, 
what the soul of man, what human society itself 
would become if religion were in effect abolished, 
if religious faith entirely disappeared \ I will not 
give way to anguish of soul or sinister presen- 
timents, but I do not hesitate to affirm that no 
imagination can represent with adequate fidelity 
what would take place in us and around us if the 
place at present occupied by Christian belief were 
on a sudden to become vacant, and its empire 
annihilated. No one could pronounce to what 
degree of disorder and degradation humanity 
would be precipitated. But awful indeed would \ 
be the result if all faith in the Supernatural were 
extinct in the soul, and if man had in a super- 
natural state neither trust nor hope. 

It is not my design, however, to confine myself 
here to the question regarded merely in its moral, 
practical fight ; I approach the Supernatural as 
viewed with the eyes of free and speculative reason. 

H 



98 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



It is condemned for its very name's sake. No- 
thing is or can be, it is said, beyond and above 
nature. Nature is one and complete ; everything 
is comprised in it ; in it, of necessity, all things 
cohere, enchain, and develop themselves. 

We are here in thorough pantheism — that is 
to say, in absolute atheism. I do not hesitate 
to give to pantheism its real name. Amongst 
the men who at the present day declare them- 
selves the opponents of the Supernatural, most, 
certainly, do not believe that they are nor do they 
desire to be atheists. But let me tell them that 
they are leading others whither they neither think 
nor wish themselves to go. The negation of the 
Supernatural, and that in the name of the 
unity and universality of nature, is pantheism, 
and pantheism is nothing more nor less than 
atheism. In the sequel of these Meditations, 
when I come to speak particularly of the actual 
state of the Christian religion, and of the different 
systems which combat it, I will in this respect 
justify my assertion ; at present, I have to repel 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



90 



direct attacks upon the Supernatural — attacks 
less fundamental than those of pantheism, but 
not less serious, for in truth, whether men know 
it or not, and whether they mean it or not, all 
attacks in this warfare reach the same object, 
and as soon as the Supernatural is the aim it is 
religion itself that receives the shaft. 

The fixity of the laws of nature is appealed to ; 
that, say they, is the palpable and incontestable 
fact established by the experience of mankind, and 
upon which rests the conduct of human life. In 
presence of the permanent order of nature and the 
immutability of its laws, we cannot admit any 
partial, any momentary infractions ; we cannot 
believe in the Supernatural, in miracles. 

True, general and constant laws do govern 
nature. Are we, therefore, to affirm that those 
laws are necessary, and that no deviation from 
them is possible in nature ? "Who is there that 
does not discern an essential, an absolute difference 
between what is general and what is necessary ? 
The permanence of the actual laws of nature is a 

H 2 



100 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



fact established by experience, but it is not the 
only fact possible, the only fact conceivable by 
reason ; those laws might have been other laws, 
— they may change. Several of them have not 
always been what they now are, for science itself 
proves that the condition of the universe has been 
different from what it is at present ; the universal 
and permanent order of which we form part, and 
in which we confide, has not always been what we 
now see it ; it has had a beginning ; the creation 
of the actual system of nature and of its laws is a 
fact as certain as the system itself is certain. 
| And what is creation but a supernatural fact, the 
act of a Power superior to the actual laws of 
nature, and which has power to modify them 
just as much as it has had power to establish 
them ? The first of miracles is God himself. 

There is a second miracle — man. I resume 
what I have already said ; by his title as a moral 
being and free agent, man lives beyond and above 
the influence of the general and permanent laws 
of nature ; he creates by his will effects which 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



101 



are not at all the necessary consequence of any 
pre-existent law ; and those effects take their 
place in a system absolutely distinct and inde- 
pendent from the visible order which governs the 
universe. The moral liberty of man is a fact as 
certain, and natural, as the order of nature, and it 
is at the same time a supernatural fact — that is 
to say, essentially foreign to the order of nature 
and to its laws. 

God is the being moral and free par excel- 
lence, that is to say, the being excellently 
capable of acting as first cause beyond the influ- 
ence of causation. By his title as a moral being 
and free agent, man is in intimate relation with 
God. Who shall define the possible contingen- 
cies, or fathom the mysteries of this relation? 
Who dare to say that God cannot modify, that He 
never does modify, according to his plans with 
respect to the moral system and to man, the 
laws which He has made and which He main- 
tains in the material order of nature ? 

Some have hesitated absolutely to deny the 



102 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



possibility of supernatural facts ; and so their 
attack is indirect. If those facts, say they, 
are not impossible, they are incredible, for no 
particular testimony of man in favour of a 
miracle can give a certitude equal to that which, 
on the opposite side, results from the experience 
which men have of the fixity of the laws of 
nature. 

" It is experience only," says Hume, "which 
gives authority to human testimony; and it 
is the same experience which assures us of 
the laws of nature. When therefore these two 
kinds of experience are contrary, we have 
nothing to do, but subtract the one from the 
other, and embrace an opinion, either on one 
side or the other, with that assurance which 
arises from the remainder. But according to the 
principles here explained, this subtraction, with 
regard to all popular religions, amounts to an 
entire annihilation : and therefore we may estab- 
lish it as a maxim, that no human testimony 
can have such force as to prove a miracle, and 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



103 



make it a just foundation for any such system 
of religion/^ It is in this reasoning of Hume 
that the opponents of miracles shut themselves 
up as in an impregnable fortress to refuse them 
all credence. 

What confusion of facts and ideas ! What 
a superficial solution of one of the grandest 
problems of our nature ! What ! a simple opera- 
tion of arithmetic, with respect to two experi- 
mental observations, estimated in ciphers, is to 
decide the question whether the universal belief 
of the race of man in the Supernatural is well- 
founded or simply absurd ; whether God only 
acts upon the world and upon man by laws 
established once for all, or whether He still con- 
tinues to make, in the exercise of his power, use 
of his liberty! Not only does the sceptic Hume 
here show himself unconscious of the grandeur 
of the problem ; he mistakes even in the motives 

* Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, by David Hume ; 
Essay on Miracles, vol. iii. p. 119—145, Bale, 1793. [Same 
work, p. 91, London, 16mo, 1860. — Translator.] 



104 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

upon which he founds his shallow conclusion ; for 
it is not from human experience alone that human 
testimony draws her authority : this authority 
has sources more profound, and a worth anterior 
to experience : it is one of the natural bonds, one 
of the spontaneous sympathies which unite with 
one another men and the generations of men, 
Is it by virtue of experience that the child trusts 
to the words of its mother, that it has faith in 
all she tells it? The mutual trust that men re- 
pose in what they say or transmit to each other 
is an instinct, primitive, spontaneous, which 
experience confirms or shakes, sets up again or 
sets bounds to, but which experience does not 
originate. 

I find in the same essay of Hume,* this 
other passage: "The passion of surprise and 
wonder, arising from miracles, being an agree- 
able emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards 
the belief of those events from which it is 
derived." 

* Hume's Essay on Miracles, p. 128, ubi supra. 



THIED MEDITATION. 



105 



Thus, if we are to credit Hume, it is merely 
for his pleasure, for the diversion of the imagina- 
tive faculty, that man believes in the Super- 
natural ; and beneath this impression — though 
real, still only of a secondary nature — which does 
no more than skim the surface of the human 
soul, the philosopher has no glimpse at all of the 
profound instincts and superior requisitions which 
have sway over him. 

But why an attack of this character, so in- 
direct and little complete'? Why should Hume 
limit himself to the proposition that miracles can 
never be historically proved, instead of at once 
affirming the impossibility of miracles themselves'? 
This is what the opponents of the Supernatural 
virtually think ; and it is because they commence 
by regarding miracles as impossible that they 
apply themselves to destroy the value of the 
evidences by which they are supported. If the 
evidence which surrounds the cradle of Christianity, 
if the fourth, if even the tenth part of it were 
adduced in support of facts of a nature extra- 



106 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



ordinary, unexpected, or unheard of, but still not 
having a character positively supernatural, the 
proof would be accepted as unexceptionable : the 
facts for certain. In appearance, it is merely the 
proof by witnesses of the Supernatural that is 
contested ; whereas, in reality, the very possi- 
bility of the thing is denied that is sought to 
be proved. The question ought to be put as it 
really is, instead of such a solution being offered 
as is a mere evasion. 

Lately, however, men of logical minds and 
daring spirits have not hesitated to speak more 
frankly and plainly. " The new dogma, they 
say, the fundamental principle of criticism, is 

the negation of the Supernatural Those 

still disposed to reject this principle have nothing 
to do with our books, and we, on our side, have 
no cause to feel disquietude at their opposition 
and their censure, for we do not write for them. 
And if this discussion is altogether avoided, it 
is because it is impossible to enter into it with- 
out admitting an unacceptable proposition, viz., 



THIRD MEDITATION. 



107 



one which presumes that the Supernatural can in 
any given case be possible/"" 

I do not reproach the disciples of the school 
of Hurne for having evinced greater timidity : if 
they attacked the Supernatural by a side way, not 
as being impossible in itself, but as being merely 
incapable of proof by human testimony, they 
did not do so designedly and with deceitful 
purpose. Let us render them more justice, 
and do them more honour. A prudent and an 
honest instinct held them back on the declivity 
upon which they had placed themselves ; they 
felt that to deny even the possibility of the 
Supernatural, was to enter at full sail into pan- 
theism and fatalism, that is to say, was the same 
thing as at once dispensing with God and doing 
away with the free agency of man. Their moral 
sense, their good sense, withheld them from 
any such course. The fundamental error of the 

* Conservation, Revolution, et Positivisme, par M. Littre, 
Preface, p. xxvi, and following pages — M. Ha vet, Revue des 
Deux Mondes, 1 Aout, 1863. 



108 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



adversaries of the Supernatural is that they con- 
test it in the name of human science, and that 
they class the Supernatural amongst facts within 
the domain of science, whereas the Supernatural 
does not fall within that domain, and the very 
attempt so to treat it has led, indeed, to its being 
entirely rejected. 



FOUETH MEDITATION, 



THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE* 

An eminent moralist, who was at the same 
time not only a theologian, but a philosopher 
well versed in the physical sciences, I mean Dr. 
Chalmers, professor at the University of Edin- 
burgh, and corresponding member of the Institute 
of France, wrote in his work on Natural The- 
ology, a chapter entitled : On maris partial and 
limited knowledge of divine things. The first 
pages are as follows :— 

"The true modern philosophy never makes 
more characteristic exhibition of itself, than at the 
limit which separates the known from the un- 
known. It is there that we behold it in a twofold 
aspect — that of the utmost deference and respect 
for all the findings of experience within this limit ; 



no 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



that, on the other hand, of the utmost disinclination 
and distrust for all those fancies of ingenious or 
plausible speculation which have their place in 
the ideal region beyond it. To call in the aid of 
a language which far surpasses our own in expres- 
sive brevity, its office is 'indagare rather than 
' divinare? The products of this philosophy are 
copies and not creations. It may discover a 
system of nature, but not devise one. It pro- 
ceeds first on the observation of individual facts 
— and if these facts are ever harmonised into a 
system, this is only in the exercise of a more 
extended observation. In the work of systema- 
tising, it makes no excursion beyond the territory 
of actual nature — for they are the actual pheno- 
mena of nature which form the first materials of 
this philosophy — and they are the actual resem- 
blances of these phenomena that form, as it were, 
the cementing principle, to which the goodly 
fabrics of modern science owe all the solidity 
and all the endurance that belong to them. It 
is this chiefly which distinguishes the philosophy 



FOURTH MEDITATION. Ill 

of the present day from that of by-gone ages. 
The one was mainly an excogitative, the other 
mainly a descriptive process — a description how- 
ever extending to the likenesses as well as to the 
peculiarities of things ; and, by means of these 
likenesses, these observed likenesses alone, often 
realising a more glorious and magnificent harmony 
than was ever pictured forth by all the imagina- 
tions of all the theorists. 

"In the mental characteristics of this philo- 
sophy, the strength of a full-grown understanding 
is blended with the modesty of childhood. The 
ideal is sacrificed to the actual — and, however 
splendid or fondly cherished a hypothesis may 
be, yet if but one phenomenon in the real history 
of nature stand in the way, it is forthwith and 
conclusively abandoned. To some the renuncia- 
tion may be as painful as the cutting off a right 
hand, or the plucking out a right eye — yet, if 
true to the great principle of the Baconian 
school, it must be submitted to. With its hardy 
disciples one valid proof outweighs a thousand 



112 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



plausibilities — and the resolute firmness where- 
with they bid away the speculations of fancy is 
only equalled by the childlike compliance where- 
with they submit themselves to the lessons of 
experience. 

" It is thus that the same principle which 
guides to a just and a sound philosophy in all 
that lies within the circle of human discovery, 
leads also to a most unpresuming and unpro- 
nouncing modesty in reference to all that lies 
beyond it. And should some new light spring 
up on this exterior region, should the information 
of its before hidden mysteries break in upon us 
from some quarter that was before inaccessible, 
it will be at once perceived (on the supposition 
of its being a genuine and not an illusory light) 
that, of all other men, they are the followers of 
Bacon and Newton who should pay the most 
unqualified respect to all its revelations. In 
their case it comes upon minds which are without 
prejudice, because on that very principle, which 
is most characteristic of our modern science, upon 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



113 



niinds without preoccupation .... The strength 
of his confidence in all the ascertained facts of 
the terra cognita is at one or in perfect harmony 
with the humility of his diffidence in regard to 
all the conceived plausibilities of the terra 
incognita. 

''And let it further be remarked of the self- 
denial which is laid upon us by Bacon's Philo- 
sophy, that, like all other self-denial in the cause 
of truth or virtue, it hath its reward. In giving 
ourselves up to its guidance, we have often to 
quit the fascinations of beautiful theory ; but in 
exchange for them, we are at length regaled by 
the higher and substantial beauties of actual 
nature. There is a stubbornness in facts before 
which the specious imagination is compelled to 
give way ; and perhaps the mind never suffers 
more painful laceration than when, after having 
vainly attempted to force nature into a compli- 
ance with her own splendid generalizations, she, 
on the appearance of some rebellious and imprac- 
ticable phenomenon, has to practise a force upon 



114 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



herself — when she thus finds the goodly specula- 
tion superseded by the homely and unwelcome 
experience. It seemed at the outset a cruel 
sacrifice, when the world of speculation, with all 
its manageable and engaging simplicities, had to 
be abandoned ; and on becoming the pupils of 
observation, we, amid the varieties of the actual 
world around us, felt as if bewildered, if not lost, 
among the perplexities of a chaos. This was a 
period of greatest sufferance ; but it has had a 
glorious termination. In return for the assiduity 
wherewith the study of nature hath been prose- 
cuted, she hath made a more abundant revelation 
of her charms. Order hath arisen out of confu- 
sion, and in the ascertained structure of the 
universe there are now found to be a state and a 
sublimity beyond all that was ever pictured by 
the mind in the days of her adventurous and un- 
fettered imagination. Even viewed in the fight 
of a noble and engaging spectacle for the fancy to 
dwell upon, who would ever think of comparing 
with the system of Newton, either that celestial 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



115 



machinery of Des Cartes, which was impelled by 
whirlpools of ether, or that still more cumbrous 
planetarium of cycles and epicycles which was the 
progeny of a remoter age ? It is thus that at the 
commencement of the observational process there 
is the abjuration of beauty. But it soon reappears 
in another form, and brightens as we advance, and 
at length there arises on solid foundation, a fairer 
and goodlier system than ever floated in airy 
romance before the eye of genius. Nor is it 
difficult to perceive the reason of this. What we 
discover by observation is the product of divine 
imagination bodied forth by creative power into a 
stable and enduring reality. What we devise by 
our own ingenuity is but the product of human 
imagination. The one is the solid archetype of 
those conceptions which are in the mind of God : 
the other is the shadowy representation of those 
conceptions which are in the mind of man. It is 
just as with the labourer, who, by excavating the 
rubbish which hides and besets some noble archi- 
tecture, does more for the gratification of our 



116 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



taste, than if by his unpractised hand he should 
attempt to regale us with plans and sketches of 
his own. And so the drudgery of experimental 
science, in exchange for that beauty whose fasci- 
nations it withstood at the outset of its career, 
has evolved a surpassing beauty from among the 

realities of truth and nature 

" The views contemplated through the medium 
of observation, are found not only to have a just- 
ness in them, but to have a grace and a grandeur 
in them far beyond all the visions which are 
contemplated through the medium of fancy, or 
which ever regaled the fondest enthusiast in the 
enchanted walks of speculation and poetry. But 
neither the grace nor the grandeur alone would, 
without evidence, have secured acceptance for 
any opinion. It must first be made to undergo, 
and without ceremony, the freest treatment from 
human eyes and human hands. It is at one time 
stretched on the rack of an experiment, at another 
it has to pass through fiery trial in the bottom of 
a crucible. In another it undergoes a long ques- 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



117 



tioning process among the fumes and the nitra- 
tions and the intense heat of a laboratory ; and 
not till it has been subjected to all this inquisi- 
torial torture and survived it, is it preferred to a 
place in the temple of Truth, or admitted among 
the laws and lessons of a sound philosophy." 

No one certainly will contest that this is the 
language of a fervent disciple of science. It is 
impossible to have a keener apprehension of its 
beauty, and to accept more completely its laws. 
What mathematician, natural philosopher, physio- 
logist, or chemist, could speak in terms of greater 
respect and submission of the necessity of obser- 
vation, and of the authority of experience ? Dr. 
Chalmers is not the less for that a true and fer- 
vent Christian ; his religious faith equals his 
scientific exactitude : he receives Christ, and pro- 
fesses Christ's doctrine with as firm a voice as he 
does Bacon and Bacon's method. Not that for 
him religious belief is the mere result of educa- 
tion, of tradition, of habit; but it, on the contrary, 
springs as much from reflection and learning, as 



118 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



his acquirements in natural science themselves ; 
in each sphere he has probed the very sources and 
weighed the motives of his convictions. How 
did he, in each instance, reach such a haven of 
repose % Whence in him this harmony between 
the philosopher and the Christian % 

Let us again allow Dr. Chalmers to speak for 
himself : — 

"It is of importance here to remark that the 
enlargement of our knowledge in all the natural 
sciences, so far from adding to our presumption, 
should , only give a profounder sense of our natural 
incapacity and ignorance in reference to the science 
of theology. It is just as if in studying the policy 
of some earthly monarch we had made the before 
unknown discovery of other empires and distant 
territories w T hereof we knew nothing but the exis- 
tence and the name. This might complicate the 
study without making the object of it at all more 
comprehensible, and so of every new wonder which 
philosophy might lay open to the gaze of inquirers. 
It might give us a larger perspective of the crea- 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



119 



tion than before, yet, in fact, cast a deeper shade 
of obscurity over the counsels and ways of the 
Creator. "We might at once obtain a deeper 
insight into the secrets of the workmanship, and 
yet feel, and legitimately feel, to be still more 
deeply out of reach, the secret purposes of Him 
who worketh all in all. Every discovery of an 
addition to the greatness of his works may bring 
with it an addition to the unsearchableness of his 
ways .... 

" That telescope which has opened our way to 
suns and systems innumerable, leaves the moral 
administration connected with them in deepest 
secresy. It has made known to us the bare 
existence of other worlds ; but it would require 
another instrument of discovery ere we could 
understand their relation to ourselves, as products 
of the same Almighty Hand, as parts or members 
of a family under the same paternal guardianship. 
This more extended survey of the Material Uni- 
verse just tells us how little we know of the 
Moral or Spiritual Universe. It reveals nothing 



120 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



to us of the worlds that roll in space, but the bare 
elements of Motion, and Magnitude, and Number 
— and so leaves us at a more hopeless distance 
from the secret of the Divine administration than 
when we reasoned of the Earth as the Universe, 
of our species as the alone rational family of God 
that He had implicated with body, or placed in 
the midst of a corporeal system .... 

" To know that we cannot know certain things, 
; is in itself positive knowledge, and a knowledge of 
the most safe and valuable nature .... There 
are few services of greater value to the cause of 
knowledge than the delineation of its boundaries."""" 

In holding this language, what in effect is 
Dr. Chalmers doing? He is separating what is 
finite from what is infinite, the thing created from 
the Creator, the world subject to government from 
the Sovereign that governs it ; and in marking 
this line of demarcation, he says in his modesty 
to science, what God in his power says to 

* Chalmers's Works : Natural Theology, pp. 249—265 ; 
Glasgow. 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



121 



the ocean: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no 
farther." 

Doctor Chalmers was right; the limits of the 
finite world are those also of human science : how 
far within these vast limits science may extend 
her empire, who shall affirm ? But what we cer- 
tainly may assert is, that she never can exceed 
them. The finite world alone is within 'her reach, 
the only world that she can fathom. It is only 
in the finite world that man s mind can fully grasp 
the facts, observe them in all their extent, and 
under all their aspects, discriminate their relations 
and their laws (which constitute also a species of 
facts), and so verify the system to which they should 
be referred. This it is that makes what we term 
scientific processes and labour, and human sciences 
are the results. 

"What need to mention that in speaking of the 
finite world, I do not mean to speak of the mate- 
rial world alone ? Moral facts there also are which 
fall under observation, and enter into the domain 
of science. The study of man in his actual con- 



122 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



dition, whether considered as an individual or as 
forming a member of a nation, is also a scientific 
study, subject to the same method as that of the ma- 
terial world : and it is its legitimate province also to 
detect in the actual order of this world the laws of 
those particular facts to which it addresses itself. 

But if the limits of the finite world are those of 
human science, they are not those of the human 
soul. Man contains in himself ideas and ambi- 
tious aspirations extending far beyond and rising 
far above the finite world, ideas of and aspirations 
towards the Infinite, the Ideal, the Perfect, the 
Immutable, the Eternal. These ideas and aspi- 
rations are themselves realities admitted by the 
human mind ; but even in admitting them man's 
mind comes to a halt ; they give him a presenti- 
ment of, or to speak with more precision, a reve- 
lation of, an order of things different from the 
facts and laws of the finite world which lies under 
his observation ; but whilst man has of this supe- 
rior order the instinct and the perspective, he can 
have of it no positive knowledge. It proceeds 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



123 



from the sublimity of his nature if he has a glimpse 
of Infinity — if he aspires to it ; whereas it results 
from the infirmity of his actual condition if his 
positive knowledge is limited by the world in 
which he exists. 

I was born in the south, under the very sun. 
I have yet, for the most part, lived in regions either 
of the north, or bordering upon the north, regions 
so frequently immersed in mists. When under their 
pale sky Ave look towards the horizon, a fog of 
greater or less density limits the view ; the vision 
itself might penetrate much farther, but an 
external obstacle arrests it ; it does not find there 
the light it needs. Eegard now the horizon under 
the pure and brilliant sky of the south; the plains, 
distant as well as near, are bathed in light ; the 
human eye can penetrate there as far as its orga- 
nization permits. If it pierces no farther, it is 
not for want of light, but because its proper and 
natural force has attained its limit : the mind 
knows that there are spaces beyond that which 
the eye traverses, but the eye penetrates them not. 



124 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

This is an image of what happens to the mind 
itself when contemplating and studying the 
universe : it reaches a point where its clear sight, 
that is to say its positive appreciation, halts, not 
that it finds there the end of things themselves, but 
the limit of man's scientific appreciation of them ; 
other realities present themselves to him ; he has 
a glimpse of them ; he believes in them sponta- 
neously and naturally ; it is not given to him 
to grasp them and to measure them ; but he 
can neither ignore them, nor know them, neither 
have positive knowledge of them, nor refrain from 
having faith in them. 

I cannot deny myself the pleasure of citing 
what I wrote thirteen years ago upon the same 
subject, when philosophically examining the real 
meaning of the word faith. " The object of every 
religious belief," said I, " is in a certain, a large 
measure, inaccessible to human science. Human 
science may establish that object's reality ; it may 
arrive at the boundary of this mysterious world ; 
and assure itself of the existence there of facts 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



125 



with which man's destiny is connected ; but it is 
not given to it so to attain the facts themselves as 
to subject them to its examination. 

"Their incapacity to do so has struck more 
than one philosopher, and has led them to the 
conclusion that no such reality exists, that every 
religious belief contemplates subjects simply chi- 
merical. Others, shutting their eyes to their own 
incompetency, have dashed daringly forwards 
towards the sphere of the supernatural ; and just 
as if they had succeeded in penetrating into it, they 
have described its facts, resolved its problems, 
assigned its laws. It is difficult to say who 
shows more foolish arrogance, the man who main- 
tains that that of which he cannot have positive 
knowledge has no real existence, or the man 
who pretends to be able to know everything 
that actually exists. However this may be, 
mankind has never for a single day assented to 
either assertion : man's instincts and his actions 
have constantly disavowed both the negation of 
the disbeliever and the confidence of the theo- 



126 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



logian. In spite of the former, he has persisted 
in believing in the existence of the unknown 
world, and in the reality of the relations which 
connect him with it : and notwithstanding the 
powerful influences of the latter, he has refused 
to admit their having attained their object — 
raised the veil ; and so man has continued to agi- 
tate the same problems, to pursue the same truths, 
as ardently and as laboriously as at the first day, 
just as if nothing had been done at all."* 

I have just read again the excellent com- 
pendium given by M. Cousin in his General 
History of Philosophy from the most Ancient 
Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. 
He establishes that all the philosophical labours 
of the human understanding have terminated in 
four great systems — sensualism, idealism, scepti- 
cism, and mysticism — the sole actors in that 
intellectual arena where, in all ages and amongst 
all nations, they are in turn in the position of 
combatants and of sovereigns. And, after having 

* Meditations et fitudes Morales, p. 170. Paris, 1851. 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



127 



clearly characterised in their origin and their 
development these four systems, M. Cousin adds, 
" As for their intrinsic merits, habituate yourselves 
to this principle : they have existed ; therefore they 
had their reason to exist ; therefore they are true 
at least in part. Error is the law of our nature : to 
it we are condemned ; and in all our opinions and 
all our words there is always a large allowance to 
be made for error, and too often for absurdity. 
But absolute absurdity does not enter into the 
mind of man ; it is the excellence of man s 
thought, that without some leaven of truth it 
admits nothing, and absolute error is impossible. 
The four systems which have just been rapidly 
laid before you have had each their existence ; 
therefore they contain truth, still without being 
entirely true. Partially true, and partially false, 
these systems reappear at all the great epochs. 
Time cannot destroy any one of them, nor can it 
beget any new one, because time develops and per- 
fects the human mind, though without changing 
its nature and its fundamental tendencies. Time 



128 



THE CHRISTIAN HELTG10N. 



does no more than multiply and vary almost 
infinitely the combinations of the four simple 
and elementary systems. Hence originate those 
countless systems which history collects and 
which it is its office to explain."* 

M. Cousin excels in explaining these number- 
less philosophical combinations, and in tracing 
them all back to the four great systems which 
he has defined ; but there is a fact still more 
important than the variety of these combinations, 
and which calls itself for explanation. "Why did 
these four essential systems — sensualism, idealism, 
scepticism, and mysticism, appear from the most 
ancient times'? why have they continued to re- 
produce themselves always and everywhere, with 
deductions more or less logical, with greater or 
less ability, but still fundamentally always and 
everywhere the same % Why, upon these supreme 
questions, did the human mind achieve at so early 

* Histoire Generale de la Philosophie depuis les temps les 
plus anciens jusqu'a la fin du XVIII Siecle, par M. Victor 
Cousin, pp. 4—31. 1863. 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



129 



a period, what may be termed, it is true, but 
essays at a solution, but which essays in some 
sort have exhausted the mind rather than satis- 
fied it 1 How is it that these different systems, 
invented with such promptitude, have never been 
able either to come to an accord, nor has any 
one been able to prevail decidedly against another 
and to cause itself to be received as the truth'? 
Why has philosophy, or, to speak more pre- 
cisely, why have metaphysics, remained essentially 
stationary ; great at their birth, but destined not 
to grow : whereas the other sciences — those styled 
natural sciences — have been essentially progres- 
sive: at first feeble, and making in succession 
conquest after conquest ; these they have been 
able to retain, until they have formed a domain 
day by day more extended and less contested ? 

The very fact that suggests these questions 
contains the answer to them. Man has, upon 
the fundamental subject of metaphysics, a primi- 
tive light, rather the heritage and dowry of 
human nature, than the conquest of human 

K 



130 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



science. The metaphysician appropriates it as 
a torch to lighten him on his obscure and ill- 
defined path. He finds in man himself a point 
of departure at once profound and certain ; but 
his aim is God ; that is to say, an aim above his 
reach. 

Must we, then, renounce the study of the great 
questions which form the subject of metaphysics 
as a vain labour, where the human mind is turn- 
ing indefinitely in the same circle, incapable not 
only of attaining the object which it is pursuing, 
but of making any advance in its pursuit ? 

Often, and with more ability than has been 
evinced by the Positive school of the present 
day, has this judgment been pronounced against 
metaphysics. But that judgment man's mind 
has never accepted, and never will accept ; the 
great problems which pass beyond the finite 
world lie propounded before him; never will 
he renounce the attempt to solve them ; he is 
impelled to it by an irresistible instinct, an 
instinct full of faith and of hope, in spite of the 



FOURTH MEDITATION. 



131 



repeated failure of Lis efforts. As man is in the* 
sphere of action, so is he also in that of thought ; 
he aspires higher than it is possible to achieve : 
this is his nature and his glory ; to renounce his 
aspirations would be declaring his own forfeiture. 
But without any such abdication, it is still neces- 
sary that he should know himself, it is necessary 
that he should understand that his strength here 
below is infinitely less than his ambition, and 
that it is not given him to have any positive 
scientific knowledge of that infinite and ideal 
world towards which he dashes. The facts and 
the problems which he there encounters are such, 
that the methods and the laws which direct the 
human mind in the study of the finite world are 
inapplicable. The infinite is for us the object not 
of science but belief, and it is alike impossible 
for us either to reject or penetrate it. Let man, 
then, feel a profound sentiment of that double 
truth : let him, without sacrificing the ambitious 
aspirations of his intelligence, recognise the limits 
imposed upon his achievements in science ; he 




THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



will not then be long in also recognising that, in 
the relations of the finite with the infinite — of 
himself with God — he stands in need of super- 
human assistance, and that this does not fail him. 
God has given to man what man never can con- 
quer, and revelation opens to him that world of 
the infinite over which, by its own exertions and 
of itself alone, man's mind never could spread 
light. The light man receives from God himself. 



FIFTH MEDITATION. 



REVELATION. 

"When it was objected to Leibnitz " that there 
is nothing in the intelligence that has not first 
been in the sense/' Leibnitz replied, " if not the 
intelligence itself." r? 

In the answer of Leibnitz I will change but a 
single word, and substitute for intelligence, soul. 
Soul is a term more comprehensive and more 
complete than intelligence ; it embraces every- 
thing in the human being that is not body and 
matter ; it is not the mere intelligence, a special 
faculty of man ; it is all the intellectual and 
moral man. 

The soul possesses itself and carries with it 

* Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. — 
Nisi intellectus ipse. 



134 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



into life native faculties and an inborn light : 
these manifest and develop themselves more and 
more as they come into relation with the exterior 
world ; but they had still an existence prior to 
those relations, and they exercise an important 
influence upon what results. The external world 
does not create nor essentially change the intel- 
lectual and moral being that has just come into 
life, but it opens to it a stage where that being 
acts in accordance at once with its proper nature, 
and the conditions and influences in the midst of 
which the action takes place. The hypothesis of 
a statue endowed with sensibility is a contradic- 
tion ; in seeking to explain man's first growth, it 
loses sight of the entire intellectual and moral 
being. 

When, as I said before, man first entered the 
world, he did not enter it, he could not enter it, 
as a new-born babe, with the mere breath of fife ; 
he was created full grown, with instincts and 
faculties complete in their power and capable 
of immediate action. We must either deny the 



FIFTH MEDITATION. 



135 



creation and be driven to monstrous hypotheses, 
or admit that the human being who now de- 
velops himself slowly and laboriously, was at 
his first appearance mature in body and in mind. 

The creation implies then the Eevelation, a 
revelation which lighted man at his entrance into 
the wor]d, and qualified him from that very 
moment to use his faculties and his instincts. 
Do we, can we, picture to ourselves the first 
man, the first human couple, with a complete 
physical development, and yet without the essen- 
tial conditions of intellectual activity, physically 
strong and morally a nonentity, the body of 
twenty years and the soul in the first hour of 
infancy ? Such a fact is self-contradictory, and 
impossible of conception. 

What was the positive extent of this primal 
revelation, the necessary attendant upon creation, 
which occurred in the first relation of God 
with man 1 No man can say. I open the book 
of Genesis and there I read : 

"And the Lord God took the man, and put 



130 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to 
keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, 
saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest 
freely eat : But of the tree of the knowledge 
of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it : for in 
the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely 
die. And the Lord God said, It is not good that 
the man should be alone ; I will make him an help 
meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord 
God formed every beast of the field, and every 
fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam 
to see what he would call them : and whatsover 
Adam called every living creature, that was the 
name thereof. And Adam gave names to all 
cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every 
beast of the field ; but for Adam there was not 
found an help meet for him. And the Lord God 
caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he 
slept : and he took one of his ribs, and closed 
up the flesh instea4 thereof ; and the rib, which 
the Lord God had taken from man, made he a 
woman, and brought her unto the man. And 



FIFTH MEDITATION. 



187 



Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and 

flesh of my flesh Therefore shall a man 

leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave 
unto his wife : and they shall be one flesh."''" 
According, then, to the Bible, the primitive 
revelation essentially bore upon the three points, 
— marriage, language, and the duty of man's 
obedience to God his Creator: Adam received at 
the hand of God the moral law of his liberty, the 
companion of his life, and the faculty by which 
he was enabled to name the creatures that were 
around him : in other words, the three sources 
of religion, of family, and of science were im- 
mediately unclosed to him. It is not necessary 
here to enter upon any of the questions which 
have been raised, as to the human origin of 
language, the primitive language, or the formation 
of families, with their influence upon the great 
organisation of society : the limits of the primi- 
tive revelation cannot be determined scientifically ; 
the fact of the revelation itself is certain. This 

* Genesis ii. 15 — 24. 



13S 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



is the light which, lighted the first man from his 
first entrance upon life, and without which it 
is impossible to conceive that he could have sur- 
vived. 

The primitive revelation did not abandon man- 
kind on its development and dispersion ; it 
accompanied it everyAvhere, as a general and 
permanent revelation. The light which had 
lighted the first man spread amongst all nations 
and throughout all ages, assuming the character 
of ideas, universal and uncontested ; of instincts, 
spontaneous and indestructible. No nation has 
been without this light, none left to its own un- 
assisted efforts to grope its way through the 
darkness of life. Let not the human understand- 
ing pride itself too much upon its works ; the 
glory does not belong to it alone : what it has 
accomplished it has accomplished by aid of the 
primitive principles received from God ; in all 
his works arid all his progress man has had for 
point of departure and support that primitive 
revelation. All the grand doctrines, all the mighty 



FIFTH MEDITATION. 



139 



institutions, which have governed the world, 
whatever intermixture of monstrous and fatal 
errors they may have contained, have preserved 
a trace of the fundamental verities which were 
the dowry of humanity at its birth. God has 
forsaken no portion of the human race ; and not 
less amidst the errors into which it has fallen, 
than in the noble developments which constitute 
its glory, we recognise signs of the primitive 
teaching derived from its Divine Author. 

After the revelation made to the first man, and 
in the midst of the general revelation diffused 
over all mankind, a great event occurs in history : 
a special revelation takes place, and has for its 
seat the bosom of an inconsiderable nation, that 
had been shut in during sixteen centuries in a 
little corner of the world ; and it was thence that, 
nineteen centuries ago, that revelation proceeded 
to enlighten and to subdue, according to the 
predictions of its Author, all the human race. 

A man of an imagination as fertile as his 
knowledge is profound, who, with an admirable 



140 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



candour has in his works associated hpyothesis 
and faith, M. Ewald, professor at the University 
of Gottingen, has recently thus characterised this 
event : — " The history of the old Jewish people is 
fundamentally the history of the true religion, 
proceeding from step to step to its complete 
development, rising through all kinds of struggles, 
until it achieves a supreme victory, and finally 
manifesting itself in all its majesty and power, in 
order to spread irresistibly, by its proper virtue, 
so as to become the eternal possession and blessing 
of all nations." * 

How is the great event thus characterised by 
M. Ewald proved % By what marks can we dis- 
tinguish the Divine origin of this special revelation 
that became the Christian religion % "What does 
it affirm itself in support of its claim to the moral 
conquest of mankind \ 

At the very outset, in proving her dogmas and 
precepts to have come from God, the Christian 

* H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus. 2nd 
ed., vol. i. p. 9. Gottingen, 1851. 



FIFTH MEDITATION. 



141 



revelation asserts that the documents in which it 
is written are themselves of divine origin. The 
divine inspiration of the sacred volume is the first 
basis of the Christian Faith, the external title of 
Christianity to authority over souls. What is 
the full import of this title ? What the signi- 
fication of the inspiration of the sacred volumes % 



SIXTH MEDITATION. 



THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 

I have read the sacred volumes over and over 
again, I have perused them in very different 
dispositions of mind, at one time studying them 
as great historical documents, at another admiring 
them as subhme works of poetry. I have expe- 
rienced an extraordinary impression, quite diffe- 
rent from either curiosity or admiration. I have 
felt myself the listener of a language other than 
that of the chronicler or the poet ; and under the 
influence of a breath issuing from other sources 
than human. Not that man does not occupy a 
great place in the sacred volumes ; he displays 
himself there, on the contrary, with all his pas- 
sions, his vices, his weaknesses, his ignorance, his 
errors ; the Hebrew people shows itself rude, bar- 
barous, changeable, superstitious, accessible to all 



SIXTH MEDITATION. 



143 



the imperfections, to all the failings, of other 
nations. But the Hebrew is not the sole actor 
in his history ; he has an Ally, a Protector, a 
Master, who intervenes incessantly to command, 
inspire, direct, strike, or 'save. God is there, 
always present, acting — 

" Et ce n'est pas iin Dieu comme vos dieux frivoles, 
Insensibles et sourds, impuissants, mutiles, 
De bois, de marbre, on d'or, comme vous le vonlez. " * 

" Not such a god as are your friv'lous gods, 
Insensible and deaf, "weak, mutilated, 
Of wood, or stone, or gold, as you will have them.' 7 

It is the God One and Supreme, All Powerful, 
the Creator, the Eternal. And even in their for- 
getfulness and their disobedience, the Hebrews 
believe still in God : He is still the object at once 
of their fear, of their hope, and of a faith that per- 
sists in the midst of the infidelity of their lives. 
The Bible is no poem in which man recounts and 
sings the adventures of his God combined with his 
own ; it is a real drama, a continued dialogue be- 
tween God and man personified in the Hebrews ; 

* Corneille, Polyeucte, acte iv. sc. 3. 



144* THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

it is, on the one side, God's will and God's action, 
and, on the other, man's liberty and man's faith, 
now in pions association, now at fatal variance. 

The more I have perused the Scriptures, the 
more surprised I feel that earnest readers should 
not have been impressed as I have been, and that 
several should have failed to see the characteristic 
of divine inspiration, so foreign to every other 
book, so remarkable in this one. That men who 
absolutely deny all supernatural action of God in 
the world, should not be more disposed to admit it 
in the sources of the Bible than elsewhere, is per- 
fectly comprehensible ; but the attack upon the 
divine inspiration of the sacred books has another 
motive, and one more likely to prove contagious. 
It is not without deep regret that I proceed 
in this place to contradict ancient traditions, at 
once respected and respectable, and perhaps to 
offend sober and sincere convictions. But my 
own conviction is stronger than my regret, and it 
is still more so because accompanied by another 
conviction, which is, that the system that it is my 



SIXTH MEDITATION. 



145 



intention to contest, has occasioned, continues to 
occasion, and may still occasion, an immense ill to 
Christianity. 

Whoever reads without prejudice in the Hebrew 
and Greek the original texts of the Scriptures, 
whether of the Old or New Testament, meets 
there often in the midst of their sublime beauties, 
I do not say merely faults of style, but of gram- 
mar, in violation of those logical and natural rules 
of language common to all tongues. Are we to 
infer that these faults have the same origin as the 
doctrines with which they are intermixed, and 
that they are both divinely inspired % * 

And yet this is what is pretended by fervent 
and learned men, who maintain that all, abso- 
lutely all, in the Scriptures is divinely inspired — 
the words as well as the ideas, all the words used 
upon all subjects, the material of language as 
well as the doctrine which lies at its base. 

* I indicate, in a note placed at the end of this volume, some 
instances of these grammatical faults met with in the Scriptures, 
and to which it is impossible to assign the character of divine 
inspiration. 

L 



146 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



In this assertion I see but deplorable confusion, 
leading to profound misapprehension both of the 
meaning and the object of the sacred books. It 
was not Gods purpose to give instruction to men 
in grammar, and if not in grammar, neither was it 
any more God's purpose to give instruction in 
geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology. 
It is on their relations with their Creator, upon 
duties of men towards Him and towards each 
other, upon the rule of faith and of conduct in 
life, that God has lighted them by light from 
heaven. It is to the subject of religion and 
morals, and to these alone, that the inspiration of 
the Scriptures is directed. 

Amongst the principal arguments alleged to 
prove that everything in the sacred volumes is 
divinely inspired, particular use has been made 
of the Second Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy, 
where in effect we find the passage : — 

" All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, 
and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for 
correction, for instruction in righteousness : 



SIXTH MEDITATION. 



" That the man of God may be perfect, tho- 
roughly furnished unto all good works." * 

Is it possible to determ in e in words of greater 
precision the religious and moral object of the 
inspiration ? 

Appeal is made to a consideration of a different 
description. If, it is said, we at the same time 
admit, on the one side, the inspiration of the sacred 
books, and on the other, that this inspiration is 
not universal and absolute, who shall make the 
selection between these two parts ? — who mark 
the limit of the inspiration \ — who say which 
texts, which passages are inspired, and which are 
not ? So to divide the Holy Scriptures is to 
strip them of their supernatural character, to 
destroy their authenticity, by surrendering them 
to all the incertitudes, all the disputes of men : a 
complete and uninterrupted inspiration alone is 
capable of commanding faith. 

Never-dying pretension of man's weakness ! 
Created intelligent and free, he proposes to use 

* 2 Timothy iii. 16, 17. 

l 2 



148 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



largely his intelligence and his freedom ; at the 
same time, conscious how feeble his means are, 
how inadequate to his aspirations, he invokes a 
guide, a support ; and from the very moment 
that his hope fixes upon it, he will have it immu- 
table, infallible. He searches a fixed point to 
which to attach himself with absolute and perma- 
nent assurance. In creating man, God did not 
leave him without fixed points ; the Divine reve- 
lation, and the inspiration of the Scriptures, had 
precisely for object and effect to supply these, but 
not on all subjects alike and without distinction. 
I refer here again to what I lately said respecting 
the separation of the finite and the infinite, of the 
world created, and of its Creator. At the same 
time that the limits of the finite world are those 
of human science, it is to human study and 
human science that God has surrendered the finite 
world ; it is not there that God has set up his 
divine torch ; He has dictated to Moses the laws 
which regulate the duties of man towards God, 
and of man towards man ; but He has left to 



SIXTH MEDITATION. 



149 



Newton the discovery of the laws which preside 
over the universe. The Scriptures speak upon all 
subjects ; circumstances connected with the finite 
world are there incessantly mixed with perspectives 
of infinity ; but it is only to the latter, to that 
future of which they permit us to snatch a view, 
and to the laws which they impose upon men, 
that the divine inspiration addresses itself ; God 
only pours his light in quarters which man's eye 
and man's labour cannot reach ; for all that 
remains, the sacred books speak the language 
used and understood by the generations to whom 
they are addressed. God does not, even when He 
inspires them, transport into future domains ot 
science the interpreters He uses, or the nations to 
whom He sends them ; He takes them both as He 
finds them, with their traditions, their notions, 
their degree of knowledge or ignorance as respects 
the finite world, of its phenomena and its laws. It 
is not the condition, the scientific progress of the 
human understanding ; it is the condition and 
moral progress of the human soul which are the 



150 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



object of the Divine action, and God requires not 
for the exercise of his power on the human soul, 
science either as a precursor or a companion ; He 
addresses himself to instincts and desires the most 
intimate and most sublime as well as the most 
universal in man's nature, to instincts and desires 
of which science is neither the object nor the 
measure, and which require to be satisfied from 
other sources. Whatever true or false science we 
find in the Scriptures upon the subject of the finite 
world, proceeds from the writers themselves or 
their contemporaries ; they have spoken as they 
believed, or as those believed who surrounded 
them when they spoke : on the other hand, the 
light thrown over the infinite, the law laid down, 
and the perspective opened by that same light, 
these are what proceed from God, and which He 
has inspired in the Scriptures. Their object is 
essentially and exclusively moral and practical ; 
they express the ideas, employ the images, and 
speak the language best calculated to produce a 
powerful effect upon the soul, to regenerate and to 



SIXTH MEDITATION. 



15L 



save it. I open the Gospel according to St. Luke, 
and I there read the admirable parable : — 

" There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in 
purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day : 

" And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which 
was laid at his gate, full of sores, 

" And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from 
the rich man's table : moreover the dogs came and licked 
his sores. 

" And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was 
carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom : the rich man 
also died, and was buried ; 

" And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and 
seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. 

" And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy 
on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his 
finger in water, and cool my tongue ; for I am tormented 
in this flame. 

" But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy 
lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus 
evil things ; but now he is comforted, and thou art tor- 
mented. 

" And beside all this, between us and you there is a great 
gulf fixed : so that they which would pass from hence to 
you cannot ; neither can they pass to us, that would come 
from thence. 

" Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou 
wouldest send him to my father's house : 



152 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



"For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto 
them, lest they also come into this place of torment. 

" Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the 
prophets ; let them hear them. 

" And he said, Nay, father Abraham : but if one went 
unto them from the dead, they will repent. 

" And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the 
prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose 
from the dead."* 

Was it the intention of Jesus, and of the Evan- 
gelist who has repeated his words, to describe, as 
they really are, the condition of men after their 
earthly existence, their positive local position after 
God's judgment, and their relations either with 
each other or with the world which they have 
quitted ? Certainly not ; the material circum- 
stances intermixed with this dialogue are only 
images borrowed from actual common life. But 
what images so strike, so penetrate the soul % 
What more solemn warning addressed to men in 
this life, to rouse them to a sense of their duties 
towards God and their fellow creatures, in the 
name of the mysterious future that awaits them \ 

* Luke xvi. 19—31. 



SIXTH MEDITATION. 



153 



Nothing is farther from my thought than to 
see in the sacred books mere poetical images and 
symbols ; those books are really, with respect to 
the religious problems that beset man's thoughts, 
the Light and the voice of God ; still, that Light 
only lights, that voice only reveals revelations of 
God with man, duties which God enjoins men 
in the course of their present life, and prospects 
which He opens to them beyond the imperfect and 
limited world where this life passes. As for this 
life itself, it is the object of human study and 
science, not of the inspiration of the sacred Scrip- 
tures. In disregarding this limit, in pretending to 
attribute to the language of the Scriptures, used 
with reference to the phenomena of the finite 
• world, the character of divine inspiration, men have 
fallen with respect both to thought and act into 
deplorable errors. Hence proceeded the trial of 
Galileo, and numerous other controversies, nume- 
rous other condemnations still more absurd, still 
more to be regretted, in which Christianity 
was immediately placed in opposition to human 



154 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



science, and constrained to inflict or receive re- 
markable disavowals. The same is the case at 
the present day with respect to numerous objec- 
tions made in the name of the natural sciences to 
Christianity, and which from the learned circles 
where they have their birth, spread over a world 
at once curious and frivolous, where they cause 
the Christian faith itself to be regarded as ignorant 
credulity. Nothing of this kind could ever occur, 
no necessity of such conflict could await the 
Christian religion, if on the one side the limits of 
human science, and on the other those of divine 
inspiration, were recognised as they really are, 
and respected according to their rightful claims. 

I might cite in aid of the opinion I support 
numerous and great authorities. I will refer to % 
but three, appealed to by Galileo himself in 1615 
in his letters to the Grand Duchess Christina of 
Lorraine* — (who could appeal to authorities more 
august ?) — " Many things," says St. Jerome, " are 

* Opere Complete cli Galileo-Galilei, t. ii. chap. ii. pp. 26 — 
64. Florence, 1843. 



SIXTH MEDITATION. 



155 



recounted in the Scriptures according to the 
judgment of the times when they happened, and 
not according to the truth." * " The purpose of 
the Holy Scriptures/' says the Cardinal Baronius, 
" is to teach us how to go to heaven, and not how 
the heavens go." " This," says Kepler, " is the 
counsel I give to the man so ill informed as not 
to understand the science of astronomy, or so 
weak as to regard adhesion to Copernicus as 
proof of want of piety : — Let him at once leave 
the study of astronomy and the examination of 
the opinions of philosophers ; instead of devoting 
himself to those arduous researches, let him remain 
at home, till his fields, and occupy himself with 
his proper business ; and thence, raising towards 
the admirable vault of heaven his eyes, which 
constitute for him his sole mode of vision, let him 
pour forth his heart in thanksgivings and praises 
to God his Creator. He may rest assured that he 
is thus rendering to God a worship as perfect as 

* (Euvres de St. Jerome, Comment, in Jeremiam, ed. Vallars. 
t. ix. p. 1040. 



156 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



that of the astronomer himself, to whom God has 

accorded the gift of seeing clearer with the eyes 
of his intelligence ; but who, above all the worlds 
and all the heavens that he attains, knows and 
wills to find his God." * 

I discard, then, as absolutely foreign to the 
grand question that occupies me, all the diffi- 
culties suggested to the Scriptures in the name of 
those sciences whose province is finite nature. I 
seek and consider in these books only what is 
their sole object, — the relations of God with man, 
and the solution of those problems which these 
relations cause to weigh upon the human soul. 
The deeper we go in the study of the sacred 
volumes, restored to their real object, the more 
the divine inspiration becomes manifest and 
striking. God and man are there ever both 
present, both actors in the same history. Of this 
history it is my present object to illustrate the 
grand features. 

* Kepler, Nova Astronomic, Introductio, p. 9. Prague, 1609. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION, 



GOD ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE. 

It is far from my intention to evade the 
questions which concern the authenticity of the 
Bible, and of the respective books which compose 
it. I shall enter upon them in the second series 
of these MeditaMwiS) when I touch upon the 
history of the Christian religion. Those questions, 
however, have no bearing upon the subject which 
occupies me at the present moment ; the Bible, 
whatever its antiquity, whatever the comparative 
antiquity of its different parts, has been ever that 
witness of God in which the Hebrews believed, 
and under the law of which they lived, the great 
monument of the religion in the bosom of which 
the Christian religion took its birth. It is this 
God of whom in the Bible, and in the Bible alone, 



158 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



it is iny purpose to seek the peculiar and true 
character. 

The nations of Semitic origin have been honoured 
for their primitive and persistent faith in the unity 
of God. Under different forms, and amidst events 
very dissimilar, nearly all nations have been poly- 
theistic ; the Semitic nations alone have believed 
firmly in the one God. This great moral fact has 
been attributed to different and to complex 
causes ; but the fact itself is generally acknow- 
ledged and admitted. 

In two respects in this assertion there is exag- 
geration. On one side, among the nations of 
Semitic origin, several were polytheistic ; the 
descendants of Abraham, the Hebrews, and the 
Arab Ishmaelites, alone remained really mono- 
theistic ; on the other side, the idea of the unity 
of God was not entirely strange even to the 
polytheistic nations. The greater part, like the 
Hindoos and the Greeks, admitted one sole and 
primordial Power anterior and superior to their 
gods ; — idea, vague and searched from afar, 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



159 



derived from the instinct of man or the reflection 
of the philosopher, and which amongst those na- 
tions became neither the basis of any religion that 
deserves the name, nor any efficacious obstacle to 
idolatry. The God of the Bible is no such sterile 
abstraction ; He is the one God at the present 
time as in the origin of all things, the personal 
God, Hving, acting, and presiding efficiently over 
the destinies of the world that He has created. 

He has besides another characteristic, one far 
more striking, which belongs to Him more exclu- 
sively than that of Unity. The gods of the 
polytheistic nations have histories filled with 
events, vicissitudes, transformations, adventures. 
The mythology of the Egyptians, of the Hindoos, 
of the Greeks, of the Scandinavians, and numerous 
others, is but the poetical or symbolical recital of 
the varied and agitated lives of their gods. We 
detect in these recitals sometimes the personi- 
fication of the fancies of nations described in 
accordance with their actual phenomena, some- 
times the reminiscences of human personages who 



160 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



have struck the imagination of the people. But 
whatever their origin, whatever their name, each 
of those gods has his individual history more or 
less overladen with incidents and acts, now heroic, 
now licentious, now elegantly fantastic, now 
grossly eccentric. All the polytheistic religions 
are collections of biographies, divine or legendary, 
allegorical or completely fabulous, in which the 
careers and the passions, the actions and the 
dreams of men, reproduce themselves under the 
forms and names of deities. 

The God of the Bible has no biography, neither 
has He any personal adventures. Nothing occurs 
to Him and nothing changes in Him ; He is 
always and invariably the same, a Being real and 
personal, absolutely distinct from the finite world 
and from humanity, identical and immutable in 
the bosom of the universal diversity and move- 
ment. " I Am That I Am/' is the sole definition 
that He vouchsafes of himself, and the constant 
expression of what He is in all the course of the 
history of the Hebrews, to which He is present 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



161 



and over which He presides without ever receiving 
from it any reflex of influence. Such is the God 
of the Bible, in evident and permanent contrast 
with all the gods of polytheism, still more distinct 
and more solitary by his nature than by his 
Unity. 

This is, indeed, so peculiarly the proper and 
essential character of the God of the Bible, that 
this character has passed into the very language 
of the Hebrews, and has become there the very 
name of God. Several words are employed in 
the Bible as appellations of God. One of these 
jE7, Eloah, in the plural Eloliim, expresses force, 
creative power, and is applied to the manifold 
gods of Paganism as well as to the one God of 
the*Hebrews. El Shadda'i is translated by the 
all-powerful. Adonai signifies Lord. The word 
Yahwe or Yehwe, which becomes in Hebrew 
pronunciation Jehovah, means simply He is, 
and means self-existence, the Being Absolute and 
Eternal. This name occurs in no other of the 
Semitic languages, and it is at the epoch of 

M 



J62 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



Moses that it appears for the first time amongst 
the Hebrews : " And God spake unto Moses, 
and said unto him, I am the Eternal" (Yahwe, 
Jehovah). "And I appeared unto Abraham, 
Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of the All- 
powerful (El Shaddai), but by my name Eternal 
was I not known to them."* Yahwe, Jehovah, 
is at once the true God and the national God of 
Israel.f 

The history of the Hebrews is neither less sig- 
nificant nor less expressive than their language ; 
it is the history of the relations of the God, One 
and Immutable with the people chosen by Him 
to be the special representative of the religious 
principle, and the regenerating source of religious 
life in the human race. This people undergoes 
the destiny and trials common to all nations ; it 

* Exodus vi. 2, 3. 

f I have consulted respecting the precise sense and the dif 
f erent shades of meaning of the terms expressing God in Hebrew, 
my learned confrere at the Academy of Inscriptions, M. Munk, 
who has replied to all my inquiries with as much clearness as 
courtesy. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



163 



demands, and becomes subject to, a variety of 
different governments ; it falls into the errors 
and faults usual to nations ; it frequently suc- 
cumbs to the temptations of idolatry ; like the 
others, it has its days of virtue and of vice, of 
prosperity and of reverses, of glory and of abase- 
ment. Amidst all the vicissitudes and errors of 
the people of the Bible, the God of the Bible 
remains invariably the same, without any tincture 
of anthropomorphism, without any alteration in 
the idea which the Hebrews conceive of his 
nature, either during their fidelity or disobedience 
to his Commandments. It is always the God 
who has said, " I Am That I Am," of whom his 
people demand no other explanation of himself, 
and who, ever present and sovereign, pursues 
the designs of his providence with men, who 
either use or abuse the liberty of action which 
that God had accorded to them at their creation. 

I wish to retrace, according to the Bible, the 
principal phases and the principal actors in this 
history. The more I study, the more I feel that 

M 2 



164. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



I am watching, as M. Ewald has expressed it, 
"the career of the true religion, advancing step 
by step to its complete development," that is to 
say, that I am there observing the action of God 
upon the first steps and upon the religious progress 
of the human race. 



I. GOD AND ABRAHAM. 
The history of the Hebrews, temporal and 
spiritual, opens with Abraham. At his first 
appearance in the Bible, Abraham is a nomad 
chief, who has quitted Chaldsea and the town 
of Haran, where his father, Terah, descended 
from Shem, is still living. He is wandering 
with his family, his servants, and his flocks, at 
first on the frontiers and afterwards in the interior 
of the land of Canaan, halting wherever he finds 
water and pasturage, and conducting his tents and 
his tribe at one time through the mountainous 
districts, at another along the plains below. "Why 
has he left Chaldaea ? According to the Bible 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



165 



itself, his father was an idolater : " Your fathers," 
said Joshua to the people of Israel, "dwelt on the 
other side of the flood" (the Euphrates) "in old 
time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the 
father of Nachor : and they served other gods."*" 
The book of Judith contains a similar assertion ; f 
and the Jewish and Arabian traditions confirm, at 
the same time that they amplify, the statement : 
the father of Abraham, they say, was an idolatrous 
fanatic, and his son Abraham, having set himself 
against the practice of idolatry, was upon his 
charge thrown into a burning furnace, from which 
a miracle alone preserved him. The historian 
Josephus speaks of the insurrections which took 
place amongst the Chaldseans on the occasion of 
their religious dissensions. 

The Bible makes no allusion to these traditions ; 
from the very beginning God intervenes in the 
history of the father of the Hebrews. "The 
Eternal had said unto Abram, Get thee out of 
thy country, and from thy kindred, and from 

* Joshua xxiv. 2. f Judith v. 6 — 9. 



166 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



thy father s house, unto a land that I will shew 
thee : I will make thee a great nation, and I will 

bless thee, and make thy name great ; and in 

thee shall all families of the earth be blessed 

So Abram departed, . . . andAbram took Sarai 
his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their 
substance that they had gathered, and the sons that 
they had gotten in Haran ; and they went forth 
to go into the land of Canaan ; and into the land 
of Canaan they came." * How had God spoken 
to Abraham ? By a voice from without or by an 
internal inspiration % The writer of the Biblical 
narrative occupies himself in no respect with the 
question. God is for him, present and an actor 
in the history just as much as Abraham is ; the 
intervention of God has in his eyes nothing but 
what is perfectly simple and natural. The same 
faith animates Abraham ; he issues forth from 
Chaldsea and wanders through Palestine, accord- 
ing to the word and under the direction of the 
Eternal. 

* Genesis xii. 1 — 5. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



167 



He wanders through the midst of populations 
already established upon the land of Canaan, and 
with these he lives in peace, but still, not uniting 
with them ; bringing them succour when attacked 
by foreign chieftains ; fighting in their behalf as a 
faithful ally, sometimes, perhaps, in the character 
of a valiant condottiere, but remaining isolated in 
his capacity of nomad Patriarch, with his family 
and his tribe ; repelling even the gifts and favours 
which might perhaps lower his character or affect 
his independence. Everywhere that he halts, or 
that any incident of importance occurs to him, 
at Sichem, Bethel, Beersheba, Hebron, he raises an 
altar to his God. In his wandering uncertain life 
a famine impels him on one occasion even as far 
as Egypt : — the first perhaps of those shepherd 
chiefs who issued from Asia, and who were so 
soon to invade that rich country. Abraham 
passes in Egypt several years, well treated by the 
reigning Pharaoh; on excellent terms with the 
Egyptian priests, imparting to them and receiving 
from them such knowledge of astronomy or of 



168 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



natural philosophy as they mutually possessed ; 
but maintaining ever carefully the isolation of 
his family, of his tribe, and of his religion. Of 
his own accord, or at the instance of the Pharaoh, 
he quits Egypt, carrying with him not only his 
flocks and his camels, but his Egyptian slaves, and 
amongst others Hagar. He returns to the country 
of Canaan, again wanders through several of its 
districts, takes part in different events — internal 
troubles or foreign wars, and finally settles with 
his family and dependents at Hebron, near the 
oaks of Mamre, amongst the tribe of the children 
of Heth ; but still always in his capacity as a 
foreigner, and always careful as such to preserve 
his character and his independence. When his 
wife Sarah died, the book of Genesis tells us that, 

"Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spake unto 
the sons of Heth, saying, 

"lama stranger and a sojourner with you : giye me a 
possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury 
my dead out of my sight. 

" And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying 
unto him, 

" Hear us, my lord : thou art a mighty prince among 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



169 



us : in the choice of our sepulchres bury thy dead ; none 
of us shall withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou 
mayest bury thy dead. 

"And Abraham stood up, and bowed himself to the 
people of the land, even to the children of Heth. 

"And he communed with them, saying, If it be your 
mind that I should bury my dead out of my sight ; hear 
me, and entreat for me to Ephron the son of Zohar, 

" That he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he 
hath, which is in the end of his field ; for as much money 
as it is worth he shall give it me for a possession of a 
buryingplace amongst you. 

" And Ephron dwelt among the children of Heth : and 
Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of 
the children of Heth, even of all that went in at the gate 
of his city, saying, 

" Nay, my lord, hear me : the field give I thee, and the 
cave that is therein, I give it thee ; in the presence of the 
sons of my people give I it thee : bury thy dead. 

"And Abraham bowed down himself before the people 
of the land. 

"And he spake unto Ephron in the audience of the 
people of the land, saying, But if thou wilt give it, I pray 
thee, hear me : I will give thee money for the field ; take it 
of me, and I will bury my dead there. 

" And Ephron answered Abraham, saying unto him, 
"My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four 
hundred shekels of silver ; what is that betwixt me and 
thee ? bury therefore thy dead. 



170 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



" And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron ; and Abraham 
weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the 
audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, 
current money with the merchant. 

" And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which 
was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, 
and all the trees that were in the field, that were in all the 
borders round about, were made sure 

" Unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the 
children of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of his 
city. 

"And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the 
cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre : the same is 
Hebron in the land of Canaan. 

" And the field, and the cave that is therein, were made 
sure unto Abraham for a possession of a buryingplace by 
the sons of Heth."* 

Little importance does Abraham attach to his 
precarious condition as a wanderer and a stranger ; 
he has faith in God. God commands, and Abra- 
ham obeys. God promises, and Abraham trusts. 
One day, however, with a feeling of anxious 
humility, Abraham makes the following prayer 
to God : — " Lord Eternal, what wilt thou give 
me, seeing I go childless, and there is Eliezer of 

* Genesis xxiii. 3 — 20. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



171 



Damascus shall be my heir % And behold the 
word of the Lord came unto him, saying, This 
shall not be thine heir, but he that shall come 
forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir. 
I am God, the mighty, all-powerful ; walk before 
my face, be thou perfect. I will establish my 
covenant between me and thee, and thy seed after 
thee, in their generation, for an everlasting posses- 
sion, and I will be their God. But thou shalt 
keep my covenant therefore, thou and thy seed 
after thee, in their generations. And Abraham 
believed in the Lord ; and the Eternal counted 
it to him for righteousness." * 

In these days, in the bosom of Christian civili- 
zation, obedience to God and confidence in God 
are the first precepts, the first virtues of Christi- 
anity. They were also the virtues of Abraham, 
and the precepts inculcated by Abraham's history 
in the Bible. And the God of Abraham, the God 
of the Bible, is the same who is the object of 
adoration to the Christian of the present day ; the 

* Genesis xv. 1 — 6. and xvii. 1 — 9. 



172 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



same conception as that of those philosophers of 
the present day who believe in God, and believe 
in Him as in God Absolute and Perfect, Self- 
dependent, Eternal, without the possibility or 
attempt to define Him otherwise. Thousands of 
years have changed nothing as to the biblical 
notion of God in the human soul, nor as to the 
essential laws regulating the relation of man with 
God. 

Historical tradition fully confirms the moral fact 
here mentioned. Abraham has not been the object 
of any mystical conception, or any mythological 
metamorphosis ; nowhere has he been transformed 
into demigod or son of God; he has ever remained 
the model of religious faith and submission, the 
type of the pious man in intimate relation with God. 
Throughout all antiquity, and in all the East, as 
much for the primitive Christians as for the Jews 
and Arabs, as much for the Mussulmans as for the 
J ews and Christians, God is the God of Abraham ; 
Abraham is the friend of God, the father and the 
prince of believers ; these are the very names that 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



173 



the Gospel gives him ; * and the Koran, too, cele- 
brates him in these words : — - 

"And when the ni^ht overshadowed him, he 
saw a star, and he said, This is my Lord ; but 
when it set, he said, I like not gods which set. 
And when he saw the moon rising, he said, This 
is my Lord ; but when he saw it set, he said, 
Verily, if my Lord direct me not, I shall become 
one of the people who go astray. And when he 
saw the sun rising, he said, This is my Lord, this 
is the greatest ; but when it set, he said, my 
people, verily I am clear of that which ye associate 
with God. I direct my face unto him who hath 
created the heavens and the earth." t 

The Eternal, the God One and Immutable, is 
the God of Abraham ; Abraham is the servant 
and adorer of the true God. 



* St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans iv. ; Galatians iii. ; 
Epistle of St. James ii. 23. t Koran vi. 



174 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



H. GOD AND MOSES. 

The true idea of God, and the faith in ins 
effectual and continued providence, are the two 
great religious principles which the name of Abra- 
ham suggests. This is the beginning of the history 
of the Hebrews, and the origin of that ancient 
Covenant which, in passing from the Pentateuch 
to the Gospel, has become the new Covenant, 
the Christian Eeligion. 

About five centuries later, we find the Hebrews 
settled in Egypt, in the land of Goshen, between 
the lower Nile, the Eed Sea, and the Desert, in 
a condition very different from that in which 
they had first been when attracted to the court 
of Pharaoh by the prosperity of Joseph, the 
great-grandson of Abraham. The new Pharaoh 
oppresses them cruelly ; they are a prey to the 
miseries of slavery, the contagion of idolatry, 
to all the evils, all the perils, physical and moral, 
which can afflict a nation numerically weak, fallen 
under the yoke of one powerful and civilized. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



175 



The Hebrews nevertheless persist in their religious 
faith, cling to their national reminiscences ; they 
do not suffer their nationality to be lost in and 
confounded with that of their masters ; they en- 
dure without offering any active resistance ; they 
will not deliver themselves, but they have never 
ceased to believe in their God, and they await 
their Deliverer. 

Moses has been saved from the waters of the 
Nile by Pharaoh's own daughter. He has been 
brought up at Heliopolis, in the midst of the 
pomp of the court, and instructed in the sciences 
of the Egyptian priests. He has served the 
sovereign of Egypt ; he has commanded his troops 
and made war for Mm against the ^Ethiopians. 
He has received an Egyptian name, Osarsiph, or 
Tisithen. Everything seems to concur to make 
him an Egyptian. But he remains a faithful 
Israelite : true to the faith and to the fortunes of 
his brethren. Their oppression rouses his indig- 
nation ; he avenges one of them by killing his 
oppressor. The victims of oppression, alarmed, 



176 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



disavow Moses, instead of supporting him. Moses 
flees from Egypt and takes refuge in the Desert, 
amongst a tribe of wandering Arabs, the Midian- 
ites, sprung, like himself, from Abraham. Their 
chief, the sheick of the tribe, Jethro, called also 
Hobab, receives him as a son, and gives him 
his daughter Zipporah in marriage. The proud 
Israelite, who has declined to remain an Egyptian, 
becomes an Arab, and leads, several years, the 
nomadic life of the hospitable tribe. It is now 
in the peninsula of Sinai that Moses wanders 
with the servants and flocks of his father-in-law. 
In the centre of that peninsula, of yore a province 
in the empire of the Pharaohs, but which had 
fallen into the possession of the pastoral Arabs, 
rises Sinai, a mount with which from time im- 
memorial, among the neighbouring tribes, have 
been connected as many sacred traditions as 
have ever been assigned to Mount Ararat in 
Armenia, or the Himalayas in India. In this 
venerable spot, before a burning bush, Moses, with 
a heart full of faith, hears G-od calling him and 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



177 



commanding him to lead his people, the children 
of Israel, out of Egypt. Moses is humble, dis- 
trustful of himself, just as Abraham before him 
had been. "Who am I, that I should go unto 
Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the chil- 
dren of Israel out of Egypt ? . . When I 
come unto the children of Israel, and shall say 
unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me 
unto you ; and they shall say to me, What is his 
name \ What shall I say unto them % And God 
said unto Moses I Am That I Am : and he said, 
Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, 
I Am hath sent me unto you/' * 

Moses receives his mission from Jehovah, and 
feels no other disquietude than arises from the 
desire to accomplish it. 

In presence of such facts, with this association 
of God and man in the same work, the opponents 
of the Supernatural still clamour : " Why/' ask 
they, "this confusion of divine action and of 
human action % Has God need of mans con- 

* Exodus iii. 11, 13, 14. 

N 



178 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



currence ? Can He not, if He will, accomplish all 
his designs by himself, and through the fulness 
of his omnipotence \ " In my turn, I would ask 
them if they know why God created man, and 
if God has put them into the secret of his inten- 
tions towards the instrument whom He employs 
for his designs 1 There precisely lies the privi- 
lege of humanity : man is God's associate, subject 
to Him, yet a free agent independent of Him ; 
he intervenes by his proper action in plans of 
which only an infinitely small part is revealed to 
his intelligence and reserved for his execution. 
Western Asia and its history are full of the name 
of Moses : Jews, Christians, and Mahometans 
style him the First Prophet, the Great Lawgiver, 
the Great Theologian ; everywhere, in the scene 
of the events themselves, the places retain a 
memory of him : the traveller meets there the 
Well of Moses, the Eavine of Moses, the Moun- 
tain of Moses, the Valley of Moses. In other 
countries and other ages, this name has been 
given as the most glorious that the saints could 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



179 



receive : St. Peter lias been styled the Moses of 
the Christian Church ; St. Benedict, the Moses of 
the Monastic Orders ; Ulphilas, the Moses of the 
Goths. What did Moses do to obtain a renown 
so great and so enduring % He gained no battles ; 
he conquered no territory ; he founded no cities ; 
he governed no state ; he was not even a man in 
whom eloquence replaced other sources of influ- 
ence and power : " And Moses said unto the 
Lord, my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither 
heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy 
servant : but I am slow of speech, and of a slow 
tongue." * 

There is not in this whole history a single 
grand human action, a single grand event, pro- 
ceeding from human agency ; all, all is the work 
of God ; and Moses is nothing on any occasion 
but the interpreter and instrument of God : to 
this mission he has consecrated soul and life ; it 
is only by virtue of this title that he is powerful, 
and that he shares, as far as his capacity as a 

* Exodus iv. 10. 

2 



180 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



man permits, a work infinitely grander and more 
enduring than that accomplished by all the 
heroes and all the masters that the world ever 
acknowledged. 

I know no more striking spectacle than that 
of the unshakeable faith and inexhaustible energy 
of Moses in the pursuit of a work not his own, 
in which he executes what he has not con- 
ceived, in which he obeys rather than commands. 
Obstacles and disappointments meet him at each 
turn ; he has to struggle with weaknesses, infi- 
delity, caprices, jealousies, and seditions, and these 
not merely in his own nation, but in his own 
family. He has himself his moments of sad- 
ness, of disquietude : " And Moses cried unto 
the Lord, saying, What shall I do unto this 
people \ they be almost ready to stone me.*" . . . 
I beseech thee, shew me thy glory." And God 
answers him, " I will make all my goodness pass 
before thee. .... Thou canst not see my face : 
for there shall no man see me, and live/'' And 

* Exodus xvii. 4 ; xxxiii. 18—20. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



181 



Moses trusts in God, and continues to triumph 
whilst he obeys Him. 

The work of deliverance is consummated ; 
Moses has led the people of Israel out of Egypt, 
has surmounted the first perils and the first 
sufferings of the Desert. They advance through 
the group of mountains in the peninsula of Sinai. 
Passing from valley to valley, they arrive "at the 
entrance of a large basin surrounded by lofty 
peaks. Of these the one which commands the 
most extensive view is covered with enormous 
blocks, as if the mountain had been overthrown 
by an earthquake. A deep cleft divides the 
peak into two. 

" No one who has approached the Eas Sufsafeh 
through that noble plain, or who has looked down 
upon the plain from that majestic height, will 
willingly part with the belief that these are the 
two essential features of the view of the Israelitish 
camp. That such a plain should exist at all in 
front of such a cliff is so remarkable a coincidence 
with the sacred narrative, as to furnish a strong 



182 



THE CHRISTIAN EELTGIOX. 



internal argument, not merely of its identity with 
the scene, but of the scene itself having been 
described by an eyewitness. The awful and 
lengthened approach, as to some natural sanc- 
tuary, would have been the fittest preparation 
for the coming scene. The low line of alluvial 
mounds at the foot of the cliff exactly answers to 
the ' bounds 5 which were to keep the people off 
from 'touching the Mount/* The plain itself 
is not broken and uneven, and narrowly shut in, 
like almost all others in the range, but presenting 
a long retiring sweep, against which the people 
could 'remove and stand afar off.' The cliff, 
rising like a huge altar in front of the whole 
congregation, and visible against the sky in lonely 
grandeur from end to end of the whole plain, is 
the very image of the 'mount that might not 
be touched/ and from which ' the voice ' of God 
might be heard far and wide over the stillness 
of the plain below, widened at that point to its 
utmost extent by the confluence of all the con- 

* Exodus xix. 12. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



183 



tiguous valleys. Here, beyond all other parts of 
the peninsula, is the adytum, withdrawn, as 
if 'in the end of the world/ from all the stir 
and confusion of earthly things."* Such was three 
thousand five hundred years ago, and such is 
still, the place where Moses received from God 
and gave to the people of Israel that law of the 
Ten Commandments which resound still through 
all the Christian Churches as the first foundation 
of their faith and the first moral rule of Christian 
nations. 

The Hebrews, at the moment when the Deca- 
logue became their fundamental law, were in a 
crisis of social transformation ; they were upon 
the point of passing from the pastoral nomadic 
condition to that of farmers and settlers. It 
seems that, at such an epoch, the political insti- 
tutions of a people would, as the basis of their 
government, be its most natural and most urgent 

* Sinai and Palestine in connection with their History. By 
Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, pp. 42, 43. London, 
1862. 



1S4 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



business. The Decalogue leaves the subject 
entirely untouched; makes to it not the remotest, 
the most indirect allusion. It is a law exclu- 
sively religious and moral, which only busies 
itself about the duties of man to God and to his 
fellow-creatures, and admits by its very silence 
all the varying forms of government that the 
external or internal state of society may seem to 
require. Characteristic, grand, and original, not 
to be met with in the primitive laws of any 
other nascent state, and an admirable and re- 
markable manifestation of the Divine origin of 
this one ! It is to man's natural and his moral 
destiny that the Decalogue addresses itself; it is 
to guide man's soul and his inmost will that it 
lays down rules ; whereas it surrenders his exter- 
nal, his civil condition to all the varying chances 
of place and of time. 

Another characteristic of this law is not less 
original or less urgent : it places God, and man's 
duties towards God, at the head and front of 
man's life and man's duties ; it unites intimately 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



1S5 



religion and morality, and regards them as inse- 
parable. If philosophers, in studying, discri- 
minate between them ; if they seek in human 
nature the special principle or principles of 
morality ; if they consider the latter by itself 
and apart from religion, it is the right of science 
to do so. But still the result is but a scientific 
work — only a partial dissection of man's soul, 
addressed to only one part of its faculties, and 
holding no account of the entirety and the reality 
of the soul's life. The Human Body, taken as 
one whole, is by nature at once moral and reli- 
gious ; the moral law that he finds in himself 
needs an author and a judge ; and God is to him 
the source and guarantee, the Alpha and Omega 
of morality. 

A metaphysician may, from time to time, affirm 
the moral law, and yet forget its Divine Author. 
A man may, now and then, admit, may respect 
the principles of morality, and yet remain 
estranged from religion; all this is possible, for 
all this we see. So small a portion of Truth 



186 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



sometimes satisfies the human mind ! Man is 
so ready and so prone to misconceive and to 
mutilate himself ! His ideas are by nature so in- 
complete and inconsequent, so easily dimmed or 
perverted by his Passions or the action of his free 
will ! These are but the exceptional conditions 
of the human mind, mere scientific abstrac- 
tions ; if men admit them, their influence is 
neither general nor durable. In the natural and 
actual fife of the human race, Morality and Eeli- 
gion are necessarily united ; and it is one of the 
divine characteristics of the Decalogue, as it is 
also oue of the causes of that authority which has 
remained to it after the lapse of so many centuries, 
that it has proclaimed and taken as its foundation 
their intimate union. 

This is not the place to consider the laws of 
Moses in civil and penal matters, nor to refer to 
his ordinances respecting the worship, or to those 
that regard the organization of the priesthood of 
the Hebrews. In the former of these two branches 
of the Mosaic code, numerous dispositions, singu- 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



1S7 



laxly moral, equitable, and humane, are found in 
connection with circumstances indicating a sta/te 
of manners gross and cruel even to barbarism. 

The legislator is evidently under the empire 
of ideas and sentiments infinitely superior to those 
of the people, to whom, nevertheless, his strong 
sympathies attach him. "When we consider the 
Mosaic Legislation, we find that in everything 
which concerns the external forms and practices of 
worship, the ideas of Egypt have made great im- 
pression upon the mind of the Lawgiver, and the 
frequent use that he has made of Egyptian customs 
and ceremonies is not less visible. But far above 
these institutions and these traditions, which seem 
not seldom out of place and incoherent, soars and 
predominates constantly the Idea of the God of 
Abraham and of Jacob, of the God One and 
Eternal, of the True God. The Laws of Moses 
omit no occasion of inculcating the belief in that 
God, and of recalling Him to the recollection of 
the Hebrews. And this, not as if they were 
recalling a principle, an institution, a system ; but 



188 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 



as if they propose to place a sovereign, a lawful 
and living sovereign, in the presence of those 
whom he governs, and to whom they owe obe- 
dience and fidelity. 

Moses never speaks in his own name, or in the 
name of any human power, or of any portion of 
the Hebrew nation. God alone speaks and com- 
mands. God s word and his commands Moses 
repeats to the people. At his first ascending Mount 
Sinai, Avhen he had received the first inspiration 
from the Eternal, "Moses came and called for the 
elders of the people, and laid before their faces all 
these words which the Lord commanded him. And 
all the people answered together, and said, All 
that the Lord hath spoken we will do." * 

"When Moses, again ascending Mount Sinai, 
had received from God the Decalogue, he re- 
turned, " And he took the book of the covenant, 
and read in the audience of the people : and they 
said, All that the Lord hath said will we do, and 
be obedient." t 

* Exodus xix. 7, 8. f Exodus xxiv. 7. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION". 



189 



As the events develop themselves, the Hebrews 
are found far from rendering a constant obedience : 
they forget, they infringe — and that frequently— 
these laws of God which they have accepted; 
and God sometimes punishes, sometimes pardons 
them ; still it is always God alone that is acting ; 
it is from Him alone that all emanates ; neither 
the priests who preside over the ceremonies of 
his worship, nor the elders of Israel whom He 
summons to prostrate themselves from afar before 
Him, nor Moses himself — his sole and constant 
interpreter — do anything by themse]ves, demand 
anything for themselves. The Pentateuch is the 
history and the picture of the personal government 
by God of the Israelites. " Our legislator," says 
the historian Josephus, " had in his thoughts not 
monarchies, nor oligarchies, nor democracies, nor 
any one of those political institutions: he com- 
manded that our government should be (if it is 
permitted to make use of an expression somewhat 
exaggerated) what may be styled a Theocracy."* 

* Joseph, contra Apionem, ii. c. 17. 



190 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



The eminent writers who have recently studied 
most profoundly the Mosaic system — M. Ewald 
in Germany,* Mr. Milman and Mr. Arthur Stanley 
in England, M. Nicolas in France — have adopted 
the expression of Josephus, attaching to it its real 
and complete sense. " The term Theocracy," says 
Mr. Stanley, " has been often employed since the 
time of Moses, but in the sense of a sacerdotal 
government : a sense the very contrary to that in 
which its first author conceived it. The theo- 
cracy of Moses was not at all a government by 
priests, or opposed to kings ; it was the govern- 
ment by God himself, as opposed to a govern- 
ment by priests or by kings/' t 

"Mosaism," says M. Nicolas, "is a theocracy 
in the proper sense of the word. It would be a 
complete error to understand this word in the 
sense which usage has given to it in our language. 
There is no question here in effect of a govern- 

* Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus, ii. 188. Got- 
tingen, 1853. 

f Lectures on the Jewish Church, p. 157. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



191 



ment exercised by a sacerdotal caste in the 
name and under the inspiration, real or pre- 
tended, of God. In the Mosaic legislation the 
priests are not the ministers and instruments 
of the Divine Will ; God reigns and governs by 
himself. It is He who has given his laws to the 
Hebrews. Moses has been, it is true, the medium 
between the Eternal and the people, but the 
people has taken part in the grand spectacle of 
the Eevelation of the Law ; of this the people, in 
the exercise of its freedom, has evinced its ac- 
ceptance ; and in the covenant set on foot be- 
tween the Eternal and the family of Jacob, Moses 
has been, if I may be allowed the expression, only 
the public officer who has propounded the con- 
tract. He was himself, besides, not within the 
pale of the sacerdotal caste ; and the charge of 
keeping, amending, and seeing to the carrying 
out of the body of laws was not confided to the 
priests." * 

Let the learned men who thus characterise the 

* Eludes Critiques sur la Bible — Ancien Testament, p. 172. 



192 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



Mosaic theocracy pause here and measure the 
whole bearing of the fact which they comprehend 
so well. It is a fact unique in the history of the 
world. The idea of God is, amongst all nations, 
the source of religions ; but in every case, except 
that of the Hebrews, scarcely has the source 
appeared before it deviates and becomes troubled ; 
men take the place of God ; God's name is made 
to cover every kind of usurpation and falsehood ; 
sometimes sacerdotal corporations take possession 
of all government, civil and religious ; sometimes 
secular power overrules and enslaves Beligious 
Faith and Beligious Life. In the Mosaic Dis- 
pensation we have nothing of the kind ; its very 
origin and its fundamental principles condemn 
and prohibit even the attempt at any such 
deviations. No paramount priesthood here ; no 
secular power playing the part of the oppressor. 
God is constantly present, and sole Master. All 
passes between God and the people ; all, I say, so 
passes through the agency of a single man whom 
God inspires, and in whom the people have faith, 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



193 



asking no other authority than that of the reve- 
lation which he receives. No sign here of a fact 
of human origin : just as the God of the Bible is 
the true God, the religion that descended, by 
Moses, from Sinai upon the elect people of God 
is the true Religion destined to become, when 
Jesus Christ ascends Calvary, the Eeligion of the 
Human Race. 



HI. GOD AND THE KINGS. 

Moses having brought out of Egypt the people 
of Israel, and having conducted it through the 
Desert as far as the eastern bank of the Jordan, in 
sight of Canaan, the Promised Land, his mission 
terminates. " Get thee up," says the Eternal to 
him ; " get thee up into the top of Pisgah, and 
lift up thine eyes westward, and northward, and 
southward, and eastward, and behold it with thine 
eyes : for thou shalt not go over this Jordan. 
But charge Joshua, and encourage him, and 
strengthen him : for he shall go over before this 





194 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



people, and lie shall cause them to inherit the 
land which thou shalt see." * 

Moses has been, in the name of Jehovah, the 
liberator and the legislator ; Joshua is the con- 
queror, the rough warrior, of yet signal piety and 
modesty, the ardent servant of Jehovah, the 
faithful disciple of Moses. After passing the 
Jordan, traversing the land of Canaan in every 
direction, and giving battle in succession to the 
greater part of the tribes that inhabit it, he 
destroys, or expels, or negotiates with them, and 
divides their lands among the twelve tribes of 
Israel. These exchange their wandering life for 
that settled agricultural life of which Moses has 
given them the law. The descendants of Abraham 
settle as masters in the soil in which Abraham 
had demanded as a favour the privilege of pur- 
chasing a tomb. 

The consequences of this new situation are 
not long in showing themselves. The conquest is 
protracted and difficult : the violence and rapine 

* Deut. iii. 27, 28. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 195 

that characterise a state of war — one of dispos- 
session and of extermination — replace amongst the 
Hebrews the adventures and the pious emotions 
of the Desert. In spite of their successes, the 
conquest nevertheless remains incomplete : seve- 
ral of the Canaanitish tribes defend themselves 
efficaciously, and cling, side by side with the new 
comers, to their territory, their laws, their gods. 
The twelve tribes of Israel disperse and settle, 
each on its own account, upon different and 
distant points, some being even separated by the 
Jordan. The unity of the Hebrew nation, of its 
faith, of its law, of its government, and of its des- 
tiny weakens rapidly ; the tendency to idolatry, 
which the Hebrews had so often evinced when 
wandering in the Desert, reappears and developes 
itself, fomented by the vicinity of the Polytheistic 
tribes of Canaan. Not, however, that we can 
precisely say that Polytheism prevails against 
the One God : but rather that material images of 
Jehovah become, in the midst of particular tribes, 
the object of the idolatrous worship so strongly 

o 2 



196 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



prohibited by the Decalogue. " And the children 
of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and 
forgat the Lord their God, and served Baalim and 
the groves." * 

Under snch influences the moral and social 
state of the people of Israel undergoes profound 
changes ; the barbarism, which had been formerly 
amongst them fanatical and austere, becomes un- 
ruly and licentious ; their chiefs, their Judges, 
during the epoch which bears their name, no longer 
possess, sometimes no longer merit, their confi- 
dence ; even the heroic acts of some amongst 

3 o 

them — of Gideon, of Deborah, of Samson, — present 
rather a strange than an august character. The 
Mosaic Theocracy veils itself ; the Hebrew nation 
becomes disorganized ; day by day, the religious 
and political anarchy in Israel extends and 
becomes aggravated. 

But where the Divine Light has once shone, 
it is never completely extinguished ; and when 
the voice of God has once spoken, the sound is 

* Judges iii. 7. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



197 



never entirely lost, even to ears that no longer 
listen. It has been affirmed that after Joshua, in 
the lapse of time that took place between the 
government of the Judges and the end of the 
reign of Solomon, the recollection of Moses, of his 
actions and his laws, had almost entirely disap- 
peared — had lost all authority in Israel. Some 
passages from the biblical narrative will suffice 
to remove this error. I read in the Book of 
Judges, with respect to the Canaanitish tribes 
who resisted and survived in their countries the 
conquest and settlement of the Hebrew tribes : — 
These nations "were to prove Israel, to know 
whether they would hearken unto the command- 
ments of the Lord, which he commanded their 
fathers by the hand of Moses."* And again, 
in the Book of Samuel, it is the Eternal "that 
advanced Moses and Aaron .... which brought 
forth your fathers out of the land of Egypt, 
and made them dwell in this place." f And m 
the Book of Kings,;); David, on the point of ex- 

* Judges iii. 4. f 1 Samuel xii. 6, 8. J 1 Bangs ii. 3. 



198 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



piring, says to his son Solomon, " Keep the charge 
of the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, to 
keep his statutes, and his commandments, and his 
judgments, and his testimonies, as it is written 
in the law of Moses." And when Solomon, after 
the solemn dedication of his Temple, had addressed 
to God his prayer of thanksgiving, " he stood, and 
blessed all the congregation of Israel with a loud 
voice, saying, Blessed be the Lord, that hath 
given rest unto his people Israel, according to all 
that he promised : there hath not failed one word 
of all his good promise, which he promised by 
the hand of Moses his servant/' * 

In the customs and lives of the Israelites these 
"good promises" had not practically, it is true, 
preserved all their efficacy : the worship of Jeho- 
vah and the legislation of Moses had fallen into 
sad oblivion, and undergone serious changes. 
But, in the national sentiment, Jehovah the 
Eternal was ever the One God, the True God ; 
and Moses his interpreter. Moral and social 

* 1 Kings viii. 55, 56. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 199 

disorder had invaded the Hebrew Confederation ; 
the Divine Law and Tradition were incessantly 
violated, still not ignored : they ever continued 
the Divine Law and Tradition, the objects of the 
faith and veneration of Israel. 

When the evil of anarchy had brought with it 
great national reverses, — when the Philistines on 
the south, the Ammonites on the east, and the Meso- 
potamians on the north, had placed in jeopardy 
the Hebrew settlement in Canaan, — a general cry 
arose ; on all sides, the tribes demanded a strong 
government, a single chief, one capable of main- 
taining order within, and supporting abroad the 
position and the honour of Israel. A great and 
faithful servant of Jehovah, the last of the judges, 
and the greatest of the prophets since Moses, — 
Samuel, — had recently governed Israel, and strenu- 
ously struggled to arrest the progress of popular 
vice and misfortune ; but he had become old, and 
his sons whom he had made "judges over Israel 
. . . walked not in his ways, but turned aside after 
lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment. 



200 THE CHRISTIAN" KELIGIOK 

Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves 
together, and came to Samuel unto Kainak, and 
said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons 
walk not in thy ways : now make us a king to 
judge us like all the nations/' * 

The demand had in it nothing singular ; even 
at the epoch when God, by his servant Moses, 
was personally governing Israel, the chance of the 
establishment of a human kingdom had been 
foreseen and provided for beforehand by the 
Divine Law : " When thou art come unto the 
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and 
shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt 
say, I will set a king over me, like as all the 
nations that are about me ; thou shalt in any wise 
set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God 
shall choose : one from among thy brethren shalt 
thou set king over thee : thou mayest not set a 
stranger over thee, which is not thy brother." t 

Although thus provided for by the Divine Law, 
the demand of a king was extremely displeasing 

* 1 Samuel viii. 1 — 5. f Deut. xvii. 14, 15. 



SEVEXTH MEDITATION. 



201 



to Samuel; "for the kingly rule was odious to 
him" says the historian Josephus ; " he had an 
innate love of justice, and was ardently attached 
to the aristocratical form of government, as to the 
form of polity which rendered men happy and 
worthy of God." * But the Eternal " said unto 
Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in 
all that they say unto thee : for they have not 
rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I 
should not reign over them . . . Now therefore 
hearken unto their voice ; howbeit yet protest 
solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner 
of the king that shall reign over them." f 

Samuel predicted to the Hebrews how much 
the kingly form of government would cost them, 
all that they would have to suffer in their families, 
their property, and their liberties : " Nevertheless 
the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel * 
and they said, Nay ; but we will have a king over 
us ; that we also may be like all the nations ; and 
that our king may judge us, and go out before us, 

* Josephus, Ant. Jud. vol. vi. ch. iii. 3. f 1 Sam. viii. 7 — 9, 



202 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



and fight our battles. And Samuel heard all the 
words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the 
ears of the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, 
Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king." * 
The world s history offers no example where the 
merits and defects of absolute monarchy were so 
rapidly developed, where they were displayed so 
strikingly, as in this little Hebrew monarchy, 
instituted with the view of escaping from anarchy 
by the express desire of the people itself. Three 
kings succeed to the throne, in origin, character, 
conduct, and reign absolutely dissimilar. Saul 
is a warrior, chosen by Samuel for his strength, 
bodily beauty, and courage ; ever ready for the 
combat, but without foresight, without perse- 
verance in his military operations ; easily intoxi- 
cated with good fortune ; hurried away by brutal, 
capricious, or jealous passions ; now engaged in 
furious struggles, now appearing in a dependent 
position, with his patron Samuel, his son Jonathan, 
his son-in-law David ; a genuine barbarian king, 

* 1 Samuel viii. 19—22. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION". 



203 



arrogant, changeable of humour, impatient of con- 
trol, prone to superstition, a moment serving Israel 
against her enemies, but incapable of governing 
Israel in the name of its God. David, on the con- 
trary, is the faithful and consistent representative 
of religious faith and religious life in Israel ; the fer- 
vent and submissive adorer of the Eternal ; he is so 
at all the epochs and in the most varying aspects 
of his career, whether of humility or of grandeur ; 
at once warrior, king, prophet, poet ; as ardent to 
celebrate his God in his character of poet, as to 
serve Him in the capacity of warrior, or to obey 
Him in that of king ; equally sublime in his 
thanksgiving to the Eternal for his triumphs as in 
his invocation to Him in his distresses; accessible 
to the most culpable human weaknesses, but 
prompt to repent the offence once committed ; 
and giving always to impulses of joy or pious 
sadness the first place in his soul ; very king of 
the nation that adores the very God. David 
accomplishes the work of his time : he obtains 
the object for which the monarchy had been 



204 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



demanded and instituted : lie leaves behind him 
the tribes of Israel reunited at home, and reassured 
against foreign enemies, proceeding too in the 
path of good order and confidence. Heir to his 
father's work, his father's success, Solomon comes 
next, and reigns forty years — years of almost as 
much repose as splendour : " God gave Solomon 
wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and 
largeness of heart, even as the sand that is on 
the sea shore."* "And he had peace on all sides 
round about him. And Judah and Israel dwelt 
safely, every man under his vine and under his 
fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the 
days of Solomon." f 

The kingdom and the kingly authority rose 
under the government of Solomon, and through- 
out all Western Asia, to a degree of power 
and splendour before unknown to the Hebrews. 
A prosperity out of all proportion with the 
position of a new king and a small state, and 
which reminds us of the rapid histories and the 

* 1 Kings iv. 29. f Ibid. 24, 25. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



205 



political comets of the East. Solomon at this 
point lost sight of both wisdom and virtue : the 
first hereditary prince of the Hebrew monarchy 
terminated his life like a voluptuous sovereign 
of Ecbatana or of Nineveh ; the son of the pious 
King David became a sceptical moralist ; although 
a profound observer of the nature and destiny of 
man, such observation had led but to feeling's 
of disgust. Nor did the monarchy survive the 
monarch : the nation became effeminate and 
corrupt, in the effeminacy and corruption of its 
sovereign. Scarcely was Solomon dead, when his 
monarchy was divided into two kingdoms, which, 
at first rivals, became soon openly hostile to each 
other ; sometimes a prey to tyranny, sometimes to 
anarchy, and almost always to war. It was not, 
as formerly, merely a bad phase of transition in 
the history of the Hebrew nation ; it was the 
commencement of national decline — decline irre- 
mediable, hopeless. 

But what, in this decline, will become of the 
law revealed on Sinai to Moses \ Is it destined 



206 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



to fall with the monarchy of Solomon, or to lan- 
guish, and die out in the midst of the struggles 
and disasters of Judah and of Israel ? Quite the 
contrary : the religious faith and law of the 
Hebrews -will not only perpetuate themselves, but 
will again shine forth at this epoch of political 
ruin. 

Above the fortune of states are the designs of 
God, to which instruments are never wanting ; 
the kings continue to perpetrate acts of violence, 
and the people to show marks of weakness ; but 
amidst all, the prophets of Israel will maintain 
the ancient Covenant, and prepare the coming of 
that new Covenant which is to make of the God 
of Israel the God of mankind. 



IT. GOD AND THE PROPHETS. 
A celebrated political writer — a freethinker 
belonging to the Eadical school, somewhat also to 
the school of Positivism — Mr. J ohn Stuart Mill, has 
recently said, in his work on Government, " The 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 207 

Egyptian hierarchy, the paternal despotism of 
China, were very fit instruments for carrying 
those nations up to the point of civilisation which 
they attained. But, having reached that point, 
they were brought to a permanent halt, for want 
of mental liberty and individuality ; requisites of 
improvement which the institutions that had 
carried them thus far, entirely incapacitated them 
from acquiring ; and, as the institutions did not 
break down and give place to others, further 
improvement stopped. In contrast with these 
nations, let us consider the example of an opposite 
character afforded by another and a comparatively 
insignificant Oriental people — the Jews. They, 
too, had an absolute monarchy and a hierarchy, and 
their organised institutions were as obviously of 
sacerdotal origin as those of the Hindoos. These 
did for them what was done for other Oriental races 
by their institutions — subdued them to industry 
and order, and gave them a national life. But 
neither their kings nor their priests ever obtained, 
as in those other countries, the exclusive moulding 



208 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

of their character. Their religion, which enabled 
persons of genius and a high religious tone to be 
regarded and to regard themselves as inspired 
from Heaven, gave existence to an inestimably 
precious unorganized institution — the Order (if it 
may be so termed) of Prophets. Generally under 
the protection — it was not always effectual — of 
their sacred character, the prophets were a power 
in the nation, often more than a match for kings 
and priests, and kept up in that little corner of 
the earth the antagonism of influence, which is the 
only real security for continued progress. Eeligion 
consequently was not there — what it has been in 
so many other places — a consecration of all that 
was once established, and a barrier against further 
improvement. The remark of a distinguished 
Hebrew, M. Salvador, that the prophets were, 
in Church and State, the equivalent to the 
modern liberty of the press, gives a just but not 
an adequate conception of the part fulfilled in 
national and universal histories by this great 
element of Jewish life ; by means of which, the 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



209 



canon of inspiration never being complete, the 
persons most eminent in genius and moral feeling 
could not only denounce and reprobate, with the 
direct authority of the Almighty, whatever ap- 
peared to them deserving of such treatment, but 
could give forth better and higher interpretations 
of the national religion. Conditions more favour- 
able to progress could not easily exist ; accordingly 
the Jews, instead of being stationary like other 
Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most pro- 
gressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with 
them, have been the starting-point and main 
propelling agency of modern cultivation."* 

Mr. Mill is right, only he does not go far 
enough. Modern civilization is in effect derived 
from the Jews and from the Greeks. To the 
latter it is indebted for its human and intellectual, 
to the former for its Divine and moral, element. 
Of these two sources, we owe to the Jews, if 
not the more brilliant, at all events the more 

* Considerations on Representative Government. By Joh 1 
Stuart Mill, pp. 41—43. London. 



210 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

• 

sublime and clearly acquired one. After the 
development of power and grandeur which took 
place amongst the Jews in the reigns of David 
and Solomon, their history is but a long 
series of misfortunes and reverses, — an eventful, 
painful decline. The Hebrew state is divided 
into two kingdoms, almost constantly at war 
with each other. And whilst the kingdom of 
Israel is a prey to continual usurpations and 
revolutions, making it the scene of all the violence 
and all the vicissitudes of a tyranny, the king- 
dom of Juclah has a line of princes, in turn good 
or bad, who keep it unceasingly in a state 
of trouble and of jeopardy. Keligion falls be- 
neath the yoke of secular government; idolatry 
appears in the kingdom of Israel, and braves 
audaciously the ancient national faith. The king- 
dom of Judah, however, remains more faithful to 
Jehovah and his law, to the traditions of Moses, 
and to the race of David ; but its languishing 
faith is no longer strong enough to arrest its 
march in the path of decline. In the two king- 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



211 



doms, internal disorders are aggravated by reverses 
abroad ; in the meantime, around them mighty 
empires spring up and succeed to each other. 
First Israel and then Judah are invaded by 
strangers ; they are subjugated in turn by the 
Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Baby- 
lonians. The Hebrews are not only vanquished 
and reduced to subjection, but exiled, transported, 
led captive far from their country. A new con- 
queror, Cyrus, permits them to return to Jerusa- 
lem ; but not to resume their independence ; at 
first subjects of the Persian kings, they soon pass 
from their empire to that of the Greek generals, 
who have divided amongst one another the con- 
quests of Alexander; then to the rule of the 
Greeks succeeds that of the Eomans. Durirjg 
this succession of servitudes, scarcely are they 
allowed any moments of existence as a free 
nation, and even this freedom is more apparent 
than real. Judea, like Greece, is subjugated, but 
under circumstances of greater humiliation and 
distress. 

p 2 



212 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



And shall, then, the Hebrews oppose no effica- 
cious resistance to these reverses 1 What is to 
become, in this absolute ruin of the nationality of 
the Jews, of their God, and their faith ? Shall the 
miracles of Sinai have no more virtue than the 
mysteries of Eleusis, and Jehovah languish away 
and vanish in the routine of sacerdotal cere- 
monies, or in philosophical scepticism ? 

By no means : in the midst of his peoples 
decay, the God of Israel maintains interpreters 
who struggle with indomitable fidelity against 
public calamities and popular errors. The first 
of the prophets, Moses, had spoken in the name 
and according to the commandment of Jehovah. 
After him there never were wanting to Israel 
men who inherited or pretended to the heritage 
of the same Divine mission. " I will raise them 
up a Prophet from among their brethren, like 
unto thee/' said the Eternal unto Moses, " and will 
put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak 
unto them all that I shall command him. . . . 
But the prophet, which shall presume to speak 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



213 



a word in my name, which I have not com- 
manded him to speak, or that shall speak in 
the name of other gods, even that prophet shall 
die."* 

From Moses to Samuel, the series of the 
prophets is continued ; some of them are of 
renown, like Nathan in the reigns of David and 
Solomon ; but the greater number, without name 
in history, and appearing scattered over a long 
course of years. They are called the Seers,f or 
the Ins]iired,\ Their speech gushes forth like 
a well under the breath of God. When the 
government of the Judges gives place to that 
of the Kings, the great actor in this drama of 
transition, Samuel, opens for the prophets a new 
era ; dedicated from his infancy to God's service, 
he feels beforehand and abides the divine 
inspiration : " Speak, Lord ; for thy servant 
heareth."§ 

Not long after, his renown spreads amongst the 

* Deut. xviii. 18, 20. f Roeh or Chozeh, in Hebrew. 

X Nabi. § 1 Samuel iii. 9, 10. 



£14 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



people ; lie is not pontiff, lie is not even priest.* 
But he is pre-eminently the seer : ' " Is not the 
seer here % " Such is the question addressed to 
some young maidens by the men who are in 
search of Samuel. Saul meets him without 
knowing him, and says to him, "I pray thee 
tell me where the house of the seer is." ' ; I 
am the seer," replied Samuel ; and soon after, 
it is Samuel himself, who, in compliance with 
the popular vote, approved by God, proclaims 
Saul kins' But at the moment when he thus 
changes the theocracy in Israel into a monarchy, 
he foresees the vices and perils attendant upon 
the new government, and opposes to them the 
element of resistance drawn from their national 
beliefs and traditions ; he transforms the order 
of prophets into a permanent institution ; he 
founds schools of prophets, independent ser- 
vants of Jehovah, consecrated to the defence 
of his law and the enunciation of his will; 

* Samuel propheta fuit, judex fuit, levita fuit, non pontifex, 
ne saoerdos quideui. — St. Jeroui adv. Jovinianiim. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



215 



constituting a sort of congregation indepen- 
dent of both Church and State; leading, in 
fixed and appointed places, — at Bania, Bethel, 
Jericho, Jerusalem, — a life in co mm on, but with- 
out exclusive privileges ; the sons of the prophets 
are brought up near their fathers ; but still the 
mission of prophecy is accessible to all who have 
the call from God : " Go, thou seer," said the 
priest Amaziah, in his anger, to the prophet 
Amos, " flee thee away into the land of Judah, 
and there eat bread, and prophesy there : but 
prophesy not again any more at Bethel : for it 
is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court. 
Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I 
was no prophet, neither was I a prophet s son : 
but I was a herdman, and a gatherer of syco- 
more fruit : and the Eternal took me as I fol- 
lowed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, 
Go, prophesy unto my people Israel."* 

The prophets are neither priests nor monks: 
sprung from all the classes of the Jewish nation, 

* Amos vii. 12 — 15. 



216 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



their vocation is essentially independent. They 
belong to God alone, and await divine inspira- 
tion to oppose, as it may happen, at one time 
the tyranny of the kings, at another the passions 
of the populace, at another the corruption of 
the priesthood: their only arms, the com- 
mands of God and the gift of prophecy. The 
functions assigned to them are as different as 
the places and circumstances of their life; but 
they are ready to take any part and to encounter 
any peril : some of them, like Elijah and Elisha, 
are men of action and of combat ; the others, 
like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, are narra- 
tors, moralists, prophets ; some devote them- 
selves to attacks upon the acts of violence and 
impiety committed by the kings, the others to 
the vices and corruption of the people ; the same 
spirit, however, animates them all ; they are all 
interpreters and labourers of Jehovah ; they 
defend, all of them, the faith of God against 
idolatry, justice and right against tyranny, the 
national independence against foreign dominion, 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



217 



In the name of the God of Abraham and of 
Jacob, they labour and succeed in maintaining 
or in reanimating religious and moral life amidst 
the decay and servitude of Israel. "All the 
time," says St. Augustine, "from the epoch when 
the holy Samuel began to prophesy, to the day 
when the people of Israel was led captive into 
Babylonia, is the period of the prophets." * 

To accomplish their mission, to ensure their 
hard-earned successes, they had other arms 
than lamentations and exhortations, arising out 
of what was past and inevitable; other expe- 
dients than pious reproaches and expressions of 
regret. These defenders of the ancient faith of 
Moses do not shut themselves up within the 
external forms and rites of their religion ; they 
pursue the moral object that it proposes ; they 
insist upon the spirit that vivifies it. "Your 
new moons and your appointed feasts my soul 
hateth " (said the Lord, according to Isaiah) : 
"they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear 

* De Civitate Dei, 1. xvii. ch. 1. 



2J8 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



tliem. And when ye spread forth your hands, 
I will hide mine eyes from yon : yea, when 
ye make many prayers, I will not hear : your 
hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you j 
clean ; put away the evil of your doings from 
before mine eyes • cease to do evil ; learn 
to do well ; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, 
judge the fatherless, plead for the widow/' * 

"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord" 
(said the prophet Micah), "and bow myself 
before the kidi God ? shall I come before him 
with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old ? 
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, 
or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I 
give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit 
of my body for the sin of my soul ? He hath 
shewed thee, man, what is good; and what 
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, 
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
God?"t 

Even whilst calling the' people of Israel back 

* Isaiah i. 14—17. + Micah vi. 6—8. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



219 



to the faith of their fathers, the prophets open 
to them new perspectives : whilst reproaching 
them with the errors that have led to their decay 
and servitude, they permit them yet to see the 
future delivery and regeneration. It is their 
divine character to live at once in the past and 
in the future ; to confide alike to the ordinances 
of the Eternal and to his promises : they move 
forward, but they change not ; they believe, they 
hope ; they are faithful to Moses whilst they 
announce the Messiah. 



V. EXPECTATION OF THE MESSIAH. 

Controversy has the mischievous power of 
the Homeric Jupiter : it collects clouds amidst 
which the light that we seek for disappears. 

The Old and the New Testament, the history 
of the Jews and the history of Jesus Christ, He 
before us. Do these two monuments form but 
one single edifice % That second history, is it 
comprised and written beforehand in the first \ 



220 THE CHEISTTAN KELIGION. 



Such is the question which has for the last 
eighteen centuries occupied and divided the 
learned. Some affirm that Jesus Christ was fore- 
seen and predicted among the Jews, and that 
the series of prophecies continued from the very 
time of Moses until the advent of Christ. Others 
lay stress upon the hiatus — the want of connection 
and cohesion — the contradictions to be detected 
here between the Old and New Testament ; and 
thence they conclude that the text of the Old 
Testament by no means contains the facts that 
appear in the New Testament, and that the 
miraculous history of Jesus Christ was, in the 
bosom of Israel, neither miraculously foreseen nor 
predicted. 

Why was it, and how was it possible, that 
two assertions so contradictory came to be both 
adopted and maintained by men most of .them as 
sincere as learned ? 

They have all committed the fault of plunging 
into the petty details of facts and texts, searching 
in all places, without exception, for the complete 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



221 



demonstration of their particular theses, and 
losing sight of the great fact, the general and 
dominant fact to which we should refer as alone 
capable of solving the question. They descend 
into the mazy paths which perplex the plain 
below, instead of grasping from the summit of 
the mountains, the whole comprehensive view, 
and the grand road leading to the goal itself. 
Believers have insisted upon discovering, fact by 
fact, in the biblical prophecies the whole mission 
and all the life of Jesus. The incredulous, on the 
other hand, have minutely adverted to all the 
discrepancies, all the difficulties, suggested by a 
comparison of the texts of the Old Testament 
and of the Gospel narrative ; they have contrasted 
the glories of the Messiah, the powerful King of 
Israel, so often announced by the prophets, with 
the humble life, the cruel death of Jesus, and 
with the ruin of Jerusalem. In my opinion, they 
have on both sides lost sight of the inward and 
essential characteristic of this sublime history ; 
the special action of God is revealed therein, but 



222 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



without suppressing the action of men ; miracles 
take their place in the midst of the natural course 
of events ; the ambitious aspirations of the Jews 
connect themselves with the religious perspective 
opened to them by the prophets ; the divine and 
the human, the inspiration from on high and the 
impulse of the national imagination, appear toge- 
ther. These two elements should be disentangled: 
the mind should be raised above the perplexing 
influences which they exercise, and the attention 
directed to that heavenly beam which pierces the 
vapours of this earthly atmosphere. Thus, all 
the embarrassment that controversy occasioned 
vanishing, the history yields to us its profound 
meanings, and, in spite of complications having 
their origin in the wordy explanations of man, the 
design of God makes itself manifest in all its 
majestic simplicity. 

Discarding all discussion and commentary, let 
us merely collect, from epoch to epoch, the prin- 
cipal texts which speak of the advent of the 
future Messiah. I might here multiply citations, 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



223 



but I limit myself to those where the allusion is 
evident. It is the Bible, and the Bible alone, that 
is speaking. 

The first act of disobedience to God, the act 
of original sin, has just been committed. The 
Eternal God says to the serpent that has seduced 
Eve : " Because thou hast done this, thou art 
cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of 

the field And I will put enmity between 

thee and the woman, and between thy seed and 
her seed ; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt 
bruise his heel." * 

He that shall bruise the head of the serpent 
shall belong, says the Book of Genesis, to the 
race of Shem, to the posterity of Abraham and 
Jacob, to the kingdom of Juclah. "But thou, 
Beth-lehem Ephratah, though thou be little 
among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee 
shall he come forth unto me that is to be Buler 
in Israel." t 



* Genesis iii. 14, 15. 
f Genesis ix. 26 ; xii. 3 ; xlix. 10 ; Micah v. 2. 



224 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



Israel is at its apogee of splendour : David 
prophesies alike the sufferings and the glory of 
that Saviour of the world who is to be not merely 
the King of Zion, but " the Son and the Anointed 
of the Eternal:" "My God, my God, why hast 
thou forsaken me % " is the expression attributed 
to him by the prophet king. . . . "All they that 
see me laugh me to scorn : they shoot out the lip, 

they shake the head They gave me also 

gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me 

vinegar to drink They part my garments 

among them, and cast lots upon my vesture. . . . 
He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver 
him ; let Mm deliver him, seeing he delighted in 
him. ... Ye that fear the Lord, praise him ; all 
ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him ; and fear him, 

all ye the seed of Israel All the ends of 

the earth shall remember and turn unto the 
Lord : and all the kindreds of the nations shall 
worship before thee."* The kingdom of David 

* Psalms ii. 2, 6, 7 ; xxii. 1, 7 ; lxix. 21 ; xxii. 18, 8, 
23, 27. 



SEVENTH MEDITATIOX. 



225 



and of Solomon has begun to decay; Judah and 
Israel are separating ; both kingdoms have their 
prophets, who at one time struggle against the 
crimes and evils of their respective ages, and, 
at another, occupy themselves in disclosing 
prospects of the future. 

" Hear ye now, house of David 

"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; 
Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall 
call his name Immanuel 

" The people that walked in darkness have seen a great 
light : they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, 
upon them hath the light shined 

" For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given : 
and the government shall be upon his shoulder : and his 
name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty 
God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace 

" And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of 
Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots : 

"And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, 
the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of 
counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear 
of the Lord ; 

" and he shall not judge after the sight of his 

eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears : 

" But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and 
reprove with equity, for the meek of the earth 

Q 



2:26 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



" Listen, isles, unto me ; and hearken, ye people, from 
far ; The Lord hath called me from the womb ; from the 
bowels of - my mother hath he made mention of my 
name 

" And said nnto me, Thou art my servant, Israel, in 
whom I will be glorified. 

" Then I said, I haye laboured in Tain, I have spent my 
strength for nought, and in vain : yet surely my judgment 
is with the Lord, and my work with my God. 

"And now, saith the Lord that formed me from the 
womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him, 
Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious 
in the eyes of the Lord, and my God shall be my 
strength. 

" And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be 
my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore 
the preserved of Israel : I will also give thee for a light to 
the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the 
end of the earth 

" Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion ; shout, daughter 
of Jerusalem : behold, thy King cometh unto thee : he is 
just, and having salvation ; lowly, and riding upon an ass, 
and upon a colt the foal of an ass. 

" . . . . For he shall grow up before him as a tender 
plant, and as a root out of a dry ground : he hath no form 
nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no 
beauty that we should desire him. 

" He is despised and rejected of men ; a man of sorrows, 
and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



227 



faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him 
not. 

" Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sor- 
rows : yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and 
afflicted. 

"But he was wounded for our trangressions, he was 
bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace 
was upon him ; and with his stripes we are healed. 

"All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned 
every one to his own way ; and the Lord hath laid on him 
the iniquity of us all. 

" He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened 
not his mouth : he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, 
and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth 
not his mouth. 

" He was taken from prison and from judgment : and 
who shall declare his generation ? for he was cut off out of 
the land of the living : for the transgression of my people 
was he stricken 

"Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put 
him to grief : when thou shalt make his soul an offering 
for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and 
the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. 

" He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be 
satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant 
justify many ; for he shall bear their iniquities. 

" Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, 
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong ; because he 
hath poured out his soul unto death : and he was numbered 

y 2 



228 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOX. 



with the transgressors ; and he bare the sin of many, and 
made intercession for the transgressors." * 

Whatever controversies may arise out of these 
texts, and many others which I might cite, one 
fact subsists and rises above all question and all 
controversy. Seventeen centuries passed in the 
interval between the Decalogue being received by 
Moses upon Mount Sinai, and the actual approach 
of the Messiah announced by the prophets ; and 
at the end of these seventeen centuries, the God, 
from whom Moses received the Decalogue, He 
who defined himself to be " I am that I am." 
Jehovah, still is, has never ceased to be the God, 
the sole God of Israel. Israel has passed through 
all governments, undergone all vicissitudes, fallen 
into all the errors to which it is possible for 
a nation to succumb : the Jews have had a 
hierarchy, and judges, and kings; they have been 
alternately conquerors and conquered, masters 
and slaves ; they have had their days of power 

* Isaiah vii. 13—14; ix. 2—6; xi. 1—4; xlix. 1—6 
Zechariah ix. 9 ; Isaiah liii. 



SEVENTH MEDITATION. 



229 



and their days of humiliation, their temptation 
to idolatry and paroxysms of impiety ; still they 
have ever returned to the One God : to the true 
God ; their faith has survived all their faults and 
all their misfortunes ; and after those seventeen 
centuries, Israel is waiting at the hand of J ehovah 
a Messiah, to be, according to the affirmation of its 
greatest prophets, the Liberator and the Saviour, 
not of Israel alone, but of all nations. Fact 
without parallel in history ! In vain shall men 
exhaust against it all their science, and all their 
scepticism : there is here more than the work 
of man ; the fact itself is not human. But 
what more shall that fact become, and what shall 
be our belief, when all shall have received its 
consummation, — the prophecies their accomplish- 
ment, — when Jehovah shall have given to the 
world J esus Christ 1 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



JESUS CHRIST ACCORDING TO THE GOSPEL. 

Need I say that by the words, " the Gospel," 
here used, I understand the four Gospels, the Acts 
of the Apostles, the Epistles, all the books, in fact, 
which compose the Canon of the New Testament 
as it is received by all Christians 1 

These books have been variously studied : now 
with the design of disproving, now of explaining 
the life of Jesus Christ ; now with the object of a 
Controversialist, now with that of a Commentator. 
I approach the subject in neither character. I 
would wish to study Jesus Christ in the New 
Testament solely to know Him well, and to make 
Him well known ; to place Him before the reader, 
and to depict Him faithfully according to the 
evidence of his history. I propose hereafter, in a 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



231 



second series of these Meditations, to examine its 
authenticity, and the degree of credit to which 
it is entitled. For the moment I assume the testi- 
mony as good and valid. Beyond all doubt, at the 
outset, it is at least entitled to this respect. The 
powerful influence of these books, and of the 
accounts which they contain, such as they remain 
to us, has been put to the test and proved. They 
have overcome Paganism. They have conquered 
Greece, Eome, and barbarous Europe. They 
are actually overcoming the world. And the 
sincerity of the authors is no less certain than 
the virtue of the books : however possible it may 
be to contest the enhghtenment, the critical 
sagacity of the original historians of Jesus Christ, 
their good faith is beyond all question : it appears 
in their language ; they believed what they said ; 
they sealed their assertions with their blood : u I 
believe," said Pascal, "only those histories, the 
witnesses to which confirm their attestation by 
submitting to death." Although not always a 
sufficient reason to believe an account, it consti- 



232 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

tutes a decisive motive to believe in the sincerity 
of the witness. 

I have before cited from the Old Testament 
some of the texts which contain the promises 
made to Israel of the Messiah. These promises 
had evidently excited lively attention amongst 
the J ews ; the satisfaction felt at their accom- 
plishment expressed itself loudly at the birth of 
Jesus Christ : " And behold, there was a man in 
Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon .... wait- 
ing for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy 
Ghost was upon him. . . . Lord, now lettest thou 
thy servant depart in peace, according to thy 
word : For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, 
which thou hast prepared before the face of all 
people ; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the 
glory of thy people Israel."* 

Besides Simeon, a pious woman, Anna, "of 
about fourscore and four years, which departed 
not from the temple, but served God with fast- 
ings and prayers night and day. And she coming 

* Luke ii. 25—32 . 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



233 



in that instant gave thanks unto the Lord, and 
spake of hi in to all them that looked for redemp- 
tion in Jerusalem/** 

But there was far more than merely the 
demonstrations of Simeon and Anna. — than 
these impulses of joy on the part of the faithful 
followers of Jehovah : " In those days came 
John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness 
of Judaea. .... And the same John had 
his raiment of camels hair, and a leathern 
girdle about his loins ; and his meat was 

locusts and wild honey And saying, 

Eepent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at 
hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the 
prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying 
in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the 

Lord, make his paths straight I indeed 

baptize you with water unto repentance 

But there standeth one anions you, whom ye 
know not. He it is who, coming after me, is 
preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am 

* Luke ii. 37, 38. 



234 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



not worthy to unloose And I knew him 

not : but that he should be made manifest to 
Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water. 
.... And I saw, and bare record that this is 
the Son of God."* 

Attempts have sometimes been made, although 
with no very great confidence on the part of the 
propounders of the theory, to represent Jesus 
as the most eminent among several reformers, 
who, about the same epoch, aspired to the title 
and character of the Messiah predicted by the 
prophets and expected by Israel. Keference 
has been particularly made to one of His pre- 
decessors, Judas the Gaulonite, who, a few years 
after the birth of Jesus, on the occasion of a 
census ordered by the Imperial Legate Quirinius, 
undertook to raise Judsea in insurrection against 
this measure — against the tribute that it imposed, 
and against the Emperor himself — proclaiming 
that to God alone belonged the appellation 

* Matt. iii. 1—5 ; Mark i. 2—11 ; Luke iii. 1—18 ; John i. 
26—34. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



235 



Master, and that liberty was worth more than 
life.* 

These comparisons — I forbear to use the word 
assimilations — are entirely without foundation. 
These men, who, as it is pretended, anticipated 
the career of Jesus, were simply men who op- 
posed the Eoman dominion, and who stood up, 
like the Maccabees before them, in the name of 
national independence, and in a spirit of re- 
action in favor of the Mosaic government. Jesus 
was not so anticipated : His mission had no 
relation with any previous essay; and his sole 
forerunner was John the Baptist, as strange as 
himself to any political view or conspiracy, and as 
humble before Him — before the true, the sole 
Messiah — as Judas the Gaulonite and his ad- 
herents were bold and daring towards the 
Emperor. 

There is an interval of thirty years between 
the birth of Jesus and the day when He enters 

* Joseph. Antiq. Jud. 1. xvii. ch. 6 ; 1. xviii. ch. 1. Acts of 
the Apostles, ch. v. 34 — 39. 



236 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



actively on the performance of his divine 
mission.* These thirty years, however, were not 
idly passed, nor were they without their peculiar 
testimony to Christ and the future in store for 
Him : — 

" And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things 
which were spoken of him 

" And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, rilled 
with wisdom : and the grace of God was upon him. 

" Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the 
feast of the Passover. 

"And when he was twelve years old, they went up to 
Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. 

" And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, 
the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem ; and Joseph 
and his mother knew not of it. 

" But they, supposing him to have been in the company, 
went a day's journey ; and they sought him among their 
kinsfolk and acquaintance. 

* The question as to the precise epoch of the birth of Jesus 
Christ, as well as of the commencement and the duration of His 
public career, has been well and concisely considered in the 
Synopsis Evangelica of M. Constantin Tischendorf (p, 16 — 19. 
Leipzig, 1864). The preferable conclusion from these researches 
is, that Jesus Christ was born in the year of Borne 750, that he 
commenced his divine mission towards the end of the year of 
Rome 780, and that his death took place in the fourth month of 
the year of Rome 783. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



237 



" And when they found him not, they turned back again 
to Jerusalem, seeking him. 

" And it came to pass, that after three days they found 
him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both 
hearing them, and asking them questions. 

" And all that heard him were astonished at his under- 
standing and answers. 

" And when they saw him, they were amazed : and his 
mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with 
us ? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. 

" And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me ? 
wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business ? 

"And they understood not the saying which he spake 
unto them. 

" And he went down with them, and came to Xazareth, 
and was subject unto them: but his mother kept all these 
sayings in her heart. 

"And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in 
favour with God and man."* 

Thus begins that manifestation in the person 
of the child Jesus Christ, that mixture of 
humanity and divinity, of natural life and mira- 
culous life, which is his peculiar and sublime 
characteristic. In the opinion of the men who, 
in principle, reject the supernatural, this mixed 
* Luke ii. 33, 40—52. 



238 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



divine - human nature, and consequently Jesus 
Christ himself, is at once incomprehensible and 
inadmissible. What wonder if Christ has in these 
days to encounter such adversaries % Had He 
not to do so when invested with the attributes 
of humanity, among contemporaries, and even 
in his own family \ In his first days of human 
existence, his mother, Mary, saw Him and 
understood Him not. And nevertheless "Mary 
kept all these sayings in her heart." Expression, 
at once profound and touching ; revealing the 
mysterious complication of the nature of man ! 
Man is not content to resign himself to the limits 
imposed by the actual laws of the finite world ; 
his aspirations tend elsewhere. And still, when 
called upon to rise above the present order of 
nature — that order which he is able to appreciate 
—he experiences a certain astonishment, a certain 
hesitation ; he does not know if he ought to 
believe in that supernatural that he was recently 
invoking, and that he never ceases to invoke ; for, 
like Mary, he preserves the instinct in his heart ! 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



239 



It is just at the present clay as it was nineteen 
centuries am Jesus has ever to encounter 
such contradictory moods of human nature : He 
is confronted at once by the hope of, the thirsting 
after, the supernatural inherent in the human 
soul, and by all the objections, all the doubts that 
the supernatural itself suggests to the human 
mind. He has to satisfy that hope, to surmount 
those doubts. The Gospel opens the history of 
this solemn struggle, that gave rise to Christianity, 
and is the source of all those agitations which 
afflict Christians at the present day. 



I. JESUS CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES. 
On entering upon the active purposes of his 
mission, it is the will of Jesus to have, and He has 
Disciples — Apostles. He knows the power of an 
association founded upon faith and love. He 
knows also that faith and love are virtues as rare 
as they are efficacious. It is not numbers that He 
seeks. He surrounds himself with a select band 



240 



THE CHRISTIAN KELIGIOX. 



of believers, and lives with them in a complete 
and enduring intimacy. 

In the midst of these intimate relations, Jesus 
declares his authority primitive and supreme : — 
" Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, 
and ordained you, that ye should go and bring 
forth fruit." * 

But the authority of the Master does not 
prevent Him from evincing a tenderness full of 
trust, and from respecting himself the dignity of 
his disciples: — "Henceforth I call you not ser- 
vants ; for the servant knoweth not what his lord 
doeth : but I have called you friends ; for all 
things that I have heard of my Father I have 
made known unto you." f 

He evinces on all occasions towards his apostles 
the trust that He feels in them, and shows his 
sense of the superiority of the position to which 
He has elevated them. His language sometimes 
fills them with astonishment, and they are more 
peculiarly struck by the numerous parables in 

* J ohn xv. 16. f John xv. 15. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 241 

which, whilst addressing the assembled multitude, 
He clothes his precepts: — "And the disciples 
came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto 
them in parables ? He answered and said unto 
them, Because it is given unto you to know the 
mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them 
it is not given .... But unto those that are 
without, all these things are done in parables." * 

The confidingness of Jesus, however, never 
descends to weak compliance ; when, in an im- 
pulse of vanity and ambition, one of his apostles 
asks for a particular favour, Jesus rebukes him 
with severity : — " J ames and J ohn, the sons of 
Zebedee, come unto him, saying, Master, we would 
that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall 
desire. And he said unto them, What would ye 
that I should do for you \ They said unto him, 
Grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right 
hand, and the other on thy left hand, in thy glory. 
But Jesus said unto them, Ye know not what ye 
ask : can ye drink of the cup that I drink of I 

* Matt. xiii. 10, 11 ; Mark iv. 10, 11. 

B 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



and be baptized with, the baptism that I am bap- 
tized with ? And they said unto him, We can. 
And Jesus said unto them, Ye shall indeed drink 
of the cup that I drink of ; and with the baptism 
that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized : 
But to sit on my right hand and on my left 
hand is not mine to give ; but it shall be given to 
them for whom it is prepared .... Ye know 
that they which are accounted to rule over the 
Gentiles exercise lordship over them ; and their 
great ones exercise authority upon them. But so 
shall it not be among you : but whosoever will be 
great among you, shall be your minister." * 

Jesus having thus selected and intimately at- 
tached to Him his apostles, commissions them to 
carry forth bis law : — " Go not into the way of 
the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans 
enter ye not : But go rather to the lost sheep of 
the bouse of Israel. And as ye go, preach, 
saying, The kingdom of heaven is at band. Heal 
the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast 

* Mark x. 35—43 ; Matt. xx. 20—26. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



243 



out devils : freely ye have received, freely give. 
Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your 
purses, nor scrips for your journey, neither two 
coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves : for the work- 
man is worthy of his meat .... Behold, I send 
ye forth as sheep in the midst of wolves : be 
ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as 
doves/' * 

It is, in effect, prudence side by side with 
absolute self-denegation that Jesus, in his first 
instructions, enjoins upon his disciples ; at the 
very commencement of their mission He limits 
its object ; He recommends to them particularly 
"the lost sheep of the house of Israel;" He declares 
his will to be that, instead of a pertinacity with- 
out bounds, " they should depart, shaking off the 
dust from their feet, out of the city that should 
not receive them nor hear their words." But He 
adds immediately, as if to give to their mission 
all its grandeur : — "What I tell you in darkness, 
that speak ye in light : and what ye hear in the 

* Matt. x. 5—10,16 ; Luke x. 1—12. 



244 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

ear, that preach ye upon the house-tops. And 
fear not them which kill the body, but are not able 
to kill the soul : but rather fear him which is 
able to destroy both soul and body in hell." * 

Jesus knows that his disciples will need the 
firmest courage, and, far from promising them 
any of the goods of this world, any temporal 
successes, He discloses to them unceasingly all 
the perils they will incur, all the invectives they 
will have to endure. " But beware of men : for 
they will deliver you up to the councils, and 
they will scourge you in their synagogues ; and 
ye shall be brought before governors and kings for 
my sake, for a testimony against them and the 
Gentiles . . . And ye shall be betrayed both by 
parents, and brethren, and kinsfolks and friends ; 
and some of you shall they cause to be put to 
death. And ye shall be hated of all men for my 
name's sake." f 

What Eeformer, other than Jesus Christ, ever 
held to his followers such language \ Who else 

* Matt. x. 27, 28. f Matt. x. 17—22. Luke xxi. 12—17. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



245 



than God could have imparted to their language 
such virtue that they would in obedience to it 
sacrifice with joy not merely all the good things 
of this life, but life itself % Nevertheless, one of 
those apostles, and the first of them all, Peter, 
evinces some disquietude, if not at their lot in 
this world, at least at their destinies in the king- 
dom of heaven. "Then answered Peter and 
said unto him, Behold, we have forsaken all, and 
followed thee ; what shall we have therefore % 
And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, 
That ye which have followed me, in the regenera- 
tion when the Son of man shall sit in the throne 
of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, 
judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every 
one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or 
sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, 
or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an 
hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life." * 

But Jesus does not intend that the prospect 
of their lofty inheritance should inspire in the 

* Matt. xix. 27—29, 



246 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



minds of any of his apostles, and not more in 
that of Peter than the rest, any proud presump- 
tuousness, and He immediately adds, " But many 
that are first, shall be last ; and the last shall be 
first."* The world's history may be perused and 
reperusecl ; the causes of all the revolutions that 
have taken place in the world, whether religious 
or political, may be probed and investigated ; 
but we shall nowhere be able to trace in the 
dealings of chiefs and accomplices, of origina- 
tors and fellow-workmen, the divine character- 
istics of absolute and uncompromising sincerity 
that reign throughout the actions and language of 
Jesus Christ in His conduct towards His apostles. 
Them He has chosen and loved ; to them He has 
entrusted His work ; but He practises with them 
no arts of worldly wisdom ; He withholds nothing 
from them ; here is no faltering encouragement, 
no exaggeration in the promises that He makes 
or in the hope that He holds forth; He speaks to 
them the language of pure truth, and it is in the 

. * Matt. xix. 30. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



247 



name of that truth that He -gives them His com- 
mands and transfers to them His mission. " Never 
did man speak like this man,"* nor so deal with 
men. 



II. JESUS CHRIST AKD HIS PRECEPTS. 

Jesus speaks : — and it is at one time with His 
disciples alone, at another surrounded by eager, 
astonished multitudes ; now from the mount, now 
on the shore of the sea of Gennesareth, from a 
bark ; by the road side ; in the house of the Pha- 
risee, Simon, and the toll-gatherer, Levi ; in the 
synagogue of Nazareth, in the Temple of Jerusa- 
lem : — Jesus speaks, " not like the scribes," not like 
the philosophers ; He expounds no system ; He 
discusses no question ; He does not pace up and 
down like Socrates with his learned friends in the 
gardens of the Academy, nor lose himself in the 
mazes of the human understanding. Jesus speaks 
to men, to all men without distinction; He speaks 
to them of man's life, man's soul, man's destiny, 

* John vii. 46. 



248 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



of matters that touch all alike. And He speaks 
to them " as one having authority." 

What does He say to them \ "What teach, 
what command, in that speech full of authority \ 

He teaches them, He enjoins them, to have 
faith, hope, charity : those virtues which have now 
borne His name nineteen centuries, those virtues 
which are essentially Christian. 

Is it, then, in His own name that Jesus Christ 
teaches and commands \ By no means : " My 
doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. If 
any man will do his will, he shall know of the 
doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I 
speak of myself. 

" He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own 
glory : but he that seeketh his glory that sent 
him, the same is true, and no unrighteouness is in 

him Then cried Jesus in the Temple 

as he taught, saying, Ye both know me, and ye 
know whence I am : I am not come of myself, 
but he that sent me is true, whom ye know 
not. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



249 



" But I know him : for I am from him, and he 
hath sent me." * 

Whilst He refers everything to God, Jesus 
Christ seeks not to define or explain Him ; He 
affirms Him and demonstrates Him • God is the 
first cause, the point from which all things spring ; 
faith in God is the paramount source of virtue, 
and of power, as well as virtue, of hope and of 
resignation. 

For Jesus Christ has not only a perfect faith 
in God, He has also a profound knowledge of man : 
He knows that, unaided, man's soul cannot, with- 
out despair, without withering, bear the burthen 
imposed by the injustice of the world and of life, 
of the miseries and erroneous appreciation of 
mankind. To this injustice and this wretchedness 
Jesus Christ never ceases to oppose God, God's jus- 
tice, God's benevolence, God's succour : He recom- 
mends to Him all the forsaken, all the oppressed, 
all the wretched, all the victims of society. He 
enjoins to these not resignation alone, but Hope 

* John vii. 16—18, 28, 29. 



250 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



as the sister and companion of Faith. Nor does 
He hold forth to those that suffer the realization 
of earthly expectations, the restoration of worldly 
prosperity, as their resource and their consolation. 
He has nothing to do with remedies deceitful like 
these. He acts with the most perfect truthfulness 
and sincerity towards mankind in general, as He 
also does with His disciples : He only promises 
them the re-establishment of justice, and the 
reward of "virtue, in that mysterious future 
where God alone reigns, and of which He dis- 
closes to them the perspective without unfold- 
ing the secrets. 

Nothing strikes me more in the Gospel than 
this double character of austerity and of love, of 
severe purity and tender sympathy, which con- 
stantly appears, which reigns in the actions and 
the words of Jesus Christ in everything that 
touches the relation of God and mankind. To 
Jesus Christ the law of God is absolute, sacred ; 
the violation of the law, and sin, are odious to 
Him ; but the sinner himself irresistibly moves 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



251 



him and attracts Kim : " What man of you, having 
an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth 
not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, 
and go after that which is lost, until he find it \ 
And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his 
shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, 
he calleth together his friends and neighbours, 
saying unto them, Eejoice with me ; for I have 
found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, 
that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sin- 
ner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine 
just persons, which need no repentance." * Jesus 
said unto them, " They that are whole need not 
a physician, but they that are sick .... For I 
am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to 
repentance." f 

What is the signification of this sublime 
fact ; what the meaning in Jesus of this union, 
this harmony of severity and of love, of saint- 
like holiness and of human sympathy ? It is 
Heaven's revelation of the nature of Jesus him- 

* Luke xv. 4—7. t Matt. ix. 12, 13. 



252 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



self, of the God-man. God, he made himself 
man. God is his father, men are his brethren. 
He is pure and holy like God : He is accessible 
and sensible to all that man feels. Thus the vital 
principles of the Christian faith, the divine and 
the human nature united in Jesus, start to evi- 
dence, in his sentiments and language respecting 
the relations between God and man. The dogma 
is the foundation of the principles. 

Another fact is not less significant. At the 
same time that the divine and mysterious charac- 
ter of Jesus Christ appears in the Gospel, his acts 
and his words have a character essentially simple 
and practical. He pursues no learned object, no 
scientific plan ; He develops no system; his object 
is something infinitely grander than the triumph 
of any logical abstraction : it is to pervade the 
human soul, to establish himself in it — to save it. 
He speaks the language — He appeals to the ideas 
most calculated to ensure Him success. Some- 
times He addresses himself to the task of inspiring 
in men the most poignant disquietude as to their 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



253 



future destiny, if they violate the laws of God ; at 
other times He causes to shine before their eyes 
the realisation of the most magnificent hopes, if 
with sincerity they persist in faith. He knows the 
generation that He is addressing ; He knows human 
nature in its universality, and what it will be in 
future generations : his object is to produce upon 
it an effect at once positive, general, durable ; He 
chooses the ideas, He employs the images suitable 
to his design for the regeneration and the salva- 
tion of all. God's Ambassador is the most pene- 
trating and able of human moralists. 

More than once, the attempt has been made to 
find Him at fault, to detect in his language exagge- 
rations, contradictions, incoherencies irreconcilable 
with his divine authority. Surprise, for instance, 
has been expressed, that He should have one day 
said, according to St. Matthew : " He that is not 
with me is against me ; and he that gather eth not 
with mescattereth abroad and that He should 
another day, according to St. Mark, have used the 

* Matt. xii. 30: 



254 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



expression, " For he that is not against us is on 
our part/'* These two passages have been cha- 
racterised as furnishing " two rules of proselytism 
entirely opposed to each other, and as involving 
a contradiction growing out of some impassioned 
struggle." f In my turn I observe that it asto- 
nishes me how earnest men can fall into any 
such error. Jesus does not lay down in these 
two passages two contradictory rules of proselyt- 
ism, He merely observes and refers in turn to two 
different facts : who has not learnt, in the course 
of actual life, that, according to the difference 
of circumstances and persons, the man who 
abstains from active concurrence, who keeps him- 
self aloof, by that very fact may at one time give 
support and strength, and at another injure and 
impede \ These two assertions, far from being 
in contradiction, may be both true, and Jesus 
Christ, in uttering them, spoke as a sagacious 
observer, not as a moralist who is enunciating 
precepts. I have heard other critics reproachfully 

* Mark ix. 40. f Vie de Jesus, par M. Renan, p. 229. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



255 



regard another passage as a sort of blasphemy. 
According to St Luke : " There was in a city a 
judge, which feared not God, neither regarded 
man : and there was a widow in that city ; and 
she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine 
adversary. And he would not for a while : but 
afterward he said within himself, Though I fear 
not God, nor regard man; yet because this widow 
troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her con- 
tinual coming she weary me." * 

Is it possible to infer from these words an 
intention on the part of Jesus to liken God to 
an unjust judge, and to make the mere impor- 
tunate persistence in praying a claim to God's 
grace ] He only cited an occurrence which made 
noise in his time, in order to instil a lively 
impression of the utility of perseverance. To 
attain his end, He never makes use of out-of-the- 
way or impure expedients • but He draws from 
the ordinary events of human life examples and 
reasons to illustrate and render intelligible the 

* Luke xviii. 1 — 5. 



256 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



divine precepts, and to insure their acceptance. 
All the parables have this meaning and object. 

Next to the precepts which refer to the rela- 
tions of man with God come those which respect 
the relations of men with one another. Whilst 
Faith and Hope regard God, Charity has man for 
its object. 

Charity, it has often been repeated, is the great 
principle of Jesus Christ, pre-eminently the 
Christian virtue. I know, not, however, whether 
the source whence Christian charity derives its 
character and grandeur has been adequately 
perceived or remarked. 

In the different pagan religions, whether of 
character gross or learned, we have deifications of 
the different forces of nature or of men themselves. 
And even in those religions in which gods in their 
turn are said to assume man's shape, it is man 
particularly that is predominant, and that fives in 
the incarnation of God. Whereas in Christianity, 
it is not a god sprung from nature or of human 
origin that becomes man, but the God self-existent, 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



25? 



anterior, and superior to all beings, the God, One, 
Eternal. The Hebrew religion, alone of all reli- 
gions, shows God essentially and eternally distinct 
from the nature and the mankind that He has 
created, and that He governs. The Christian 
Faith alone shows God one and eternal ; the God 
of Abraham and of Moses making himself man, 
and the divine nature uniting itself to the human 
nature in the person of Jesus. And in this union 
it is the divine nature that shines forth, that 
speaks, that sets in movement. And this incar- 
nation is unparalleled like the God its author. 

And why did God make himself man ? What 
is the object of this unparalleled, this mysterious 
incarnation ? It is God's purpose to rescue man 
from the evil and the peril which have continued 
to weigh upon him since the fault committed by 
his first progenitor. It is God's purpose to ransom 
the human race from the sin of Adam, the heritage 
of Adam's children, and to bring it back to the 
ways of eternal life. These are the designs, loudly 
proclaimed, of the divine incarnation in Jesus, and 

' s 



258 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



the price of all the sufferings and agonies which 
He endured in its accomplishment. 

Need I say more 1 Who does not see how this 
sublime fact exalts man's dignity at the same time 
that it illustrates the worth of man's nature ? By 
the mere fact of God having assumed his form is 
man's nature glorified ; and all men, so to say, 
have their share of the honour done by God to 
humanity in uniting himself with it, and in 
accepting, for a moment of time, all the conditions 
of humanity. But as far as mankind is here con- 
cerned, it is far more than a mere accession of an 
honour or a glorifying of his nature : it is a 
striking manifestation of the value that all men 
have in the eyes of God. For it is not for some 
of them only, for some class or nation, or portion 
of humanity, it is for all humanity that God 
became incarnate in J esus Christ, and that J esus 
Christ has submitted to all human sufferings. 
Every human soul is the object of this divine 
sacrifice, and called upon to gather the fruit. 

This is the source, this the privilege of Christian 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 239 

charity. The dogma makes the force of the pre- 
cept itself. Jesus crucified is God's charity towards 
man. Impossible that men should not feel them- 
selves bound to act towards each other as God has 
done to them ; and towards what man is not 
charity a duty? "Without the divinity and sacri- 
fice of Jesus Christ, the value of man's soul, if I 
may be pardoned the expression, sinks, — neither 
his salvation nor the example of his Saviour is 
any longer the question, — charity becomes nothing 
more than human goodness ; a sentiment, however 
noble and useful, still limited both in impulsive 
energy and in efficacy ; having its source in man 
"alone, it can but incompletely solace the unequally 
distributed sufferings of mortality. It is not suited 
to inspire any long effort or great sacrifice : it is 
not adequate to convert the longing desire for the 
moral amendment, the physical relief of humanity, 
into that inextinguishable sympathy and untiring 
and impassioned emotion which really constitute 
charity, and which the Christian Faith, in the 
history of the world, has alone been able to inspire. 

s 2 



260 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



Thus the essential precepts of Jesus, the virtues 
which He commands as the basis and source of 
all the others, have an intimate connection with 
his doctrine, a doctrine " which is not," He tells us 
himself, "his, but of him that sent him;" that is 
to say, they are connected with the fundamental 
dogmas of the Christian religion. No one denies the 
perfection, the sublimity of the Gospel morality ; 
men indeed seem to feel a sort of self-complacency, 
a satisfaction in celebrating it, with a view to the 
conclusion, more or less explicitly stated, that that 
morality constitutes the whole Gospel. This is, 
however, not less than absolutely to mistake the 
bond which unites in man thought with sentiment, 
and belief with action. Man is grander and less 
easy to satisfy than superficial moralists pretend ; 
the law of his life is for him, in the profound 
instinct of his soul, necessarily connected with the 
secret of his destiny ; and it is only the Christian 
dogma that gives to Christian ethics the Eoyal 
authority of which they stand in need to govern 
and to regenerate humanity. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



261 



in. JESUS AND HIS MIRACLES. 

I have called myself one of those who admit 
the supernatural ; and I have stated my reasons. 
I might stop there and enter into no special 
reflection as to the Gospel Miracles. The pos- 
sibility of miracles once accorded in principle, 
nothing remains but to weigh the value of the 
testimony in their support. , In the second series 
of these Meditations, where I treat of the authen- 
ticity of the localities specified in the Holy Scrip- 
tures, I shall occupy myself with this examination. 
It is not, however, my wish to elude, upon the 
subjects that lie at the bottom of this question, 
any of the difficulties that it presents : for here 
we find the point of attack sought by the adver- 
saries of the Christian faith. The image of 
Christ as it results from the Gospel would be 
besides singularly unfaithful, did we not range 
in it his miracles by the side of his precepts. 

I avow once more my belief in God, in God 
the Creator, the Sovereign Master of the Universe, 



262 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



who orders it and governs it by that independent 
and constant action of his providence and power 
styled the Laws of Nature. To those who regard 
nature as having existed from all eternity of 
itself, and governed by laws immutable and pro- 
ceeding from fate, I have nothing to say of Jesus 
or his miracles ; the question at issue between 
them and me is more important than that which 
respects miracles ; it -involves the very question 
of Pantheism or Christianity, of Fatalism or 
Liberty, affecting both God and man. Upon 
these subjects I have already expressed my 
general opinion and its grounds. I propose to 
enter further upon it in the third series of 
these Meditations, when I come to speak of 
the different systems which are now in conflict 
throughout Christendom. But at this moment 
I address myself to Deists and to men of waver- 
ing minds, and to these alone. 

One thing is beyond all doubt : the perfect 
sincerity of the apostles and of the primitive 
Christians as to their faith in the miracles of 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



263 



Jesus. Sincerity still more striking that it is 
united to every sort of hesitation in the mind 
and weakness in the conduct, and that it only 
triumphs gradually and slowly when Jesus has 
quitted his disciples and has left them alone 
charged with his work. Whilst He was with 
them, St. Peter has failed, St. Thomas has 
doubted ; after several miracles have been per- 
formed by Jesus, his disciples are astonished, put 
questions to Him, yet still doubt of Him and 
of his power. Upon several occasions Jesus ad- 
dresses them as men " of little faith," and at the 
moment when He is arrested, they abandon Him, 
they fly from Him. No impassioned enthusiasm, 
no exaggeration in their trustfulness and their 
devotedness ; even with them Jesus sees himself 
confronted by all the vacillations and pusillani- 
mity of humanity ; He persuades them, He wins 
them, He preserves them only by great exertion, 
and by dint, so to say, of divine power and 
divine virtue. They only really believe in Him 
after having witnessed the accomplishment of his 



264 



THE CHRISTIAN KELIGIOX. 



sacrifice and his last miracle, when they had seen 
his Crucifixion and his Eesurrection. Only then 
they believed ; but from that moment their faith 
became absolute, superior to all perils and all 
trials : full of the Holy Spirit, and associated in 
a certain measure to their divine Master, they 
pursue his work with unshaken confidence and 
firmness, without pretending to any merit, with- 
out any impulse of personal pride. Before " the 
gate of the Temple which is called Beautiful." 
St. Peter has healed a lame man and made him 
to walk. "And as the lame man which was 
healed held Peter and John, all the people ran 
together unto them in the porch that is called 
Solomon's, greatly wondering. And when Peter 
saw it, he answered unto the people, Ye men of 
Israel, why marvel ye at this % or why look ye so 
earnestly on us, as though by our own power or 
holiness we had made this man to walk ?..... 
Ye killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised 
from the dead ; whereof we are witnesses. And 
his name through faith in his name hath made 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



265 



this man strong, whom ye see and know : yea, 
the faith which is by him hath given him this 
perfect soundness in the presence of you all."* 
It was not the people only that felt astonishment, 
but " the rulers and elders ; the scribes, the high 
priest, and all those who were of the kindred of 
the high priest, were gathered together at Jeru- 
salem, and set in their midst " Peter and John, 
and after a deliberation full of anxiety, they 
" commanded them not to speak at all, nor teach 
in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John 
answered and said unto them, Whether it be 
right in the sight of God to hearken unto you 
more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot 
but speak the things we have seen and heard." f 

What sincerity and what firmness ever showed 
themselves more strikingly than those that grew 
out of the faith of St. Paul ? From such faith he 
had been originally farther removed than the 
other apostles; he had done far more than merely 
err like Peter or doubt like Thomas ; he had 

* Acts iii. 1—16. f Acts iv. 5, 6, 18—20. 



266 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



hotly persecuted the first followers of Christ. 
In his turn penetrated and subdued on the road 
to Damascus by the voice of Jesus, he devotes 
himself to Him life and soul ; he recounts himself 
his miraculous conversion,* and as little doubt 
can be entertained of the authenticity of his 
Epistles as of the sincerity that dictated them. 

The history of all religions abounds in miracles ; 
but in all religions except the Christian, the 
miracles recounted by their historians are evi- 
dently either contrivances of the founder to 
induce persuasion, or they spring from the play 
of the human imagination, ever disposed to 
delight in the marvellous, ever particularly prone 
to give way in the sphere of religion to its 
fantastic suggestions. In the Gospel miracles, on 
the contrary, we have nothing of the kind ; no 
artifice in their Author ; none of the marvellous 
machinery of poetry, nor any hasty credulity in 
the historians. The miraculous agency of Christ 

* 1 Corinth, xv. 8. 2 Corinth, xi. 32, 33 ; xii. 1—5. Galat. 
i. 1—4. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



267 



is essentially simple, practical, and moral : He 
does not go in search of miracles : neither does 
He make any vain display of them : they 
are wrought when a pressing emergency or a 
natural occasion calls for them ; and when they 
are demanded in faith and in trust, He then 
works them without ostentation and in right of 
his divine mission ; whilst at the very moment 
He makes the doubt and the coldness with which 
He is received, the subject of complaint : " Woe 
unto thee, Chorazin ! wo unto thee, Bethsaida ! 
for if the mighty works, which were done in you, 
had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would 
have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes."* 
Jesus has full confidence in himself, in the miracles 
that He effects, in the doctrine that He inculcates. 
He feels no astonishment, but merely sorrow, that 
His work, the work of light and of salvation, 
pursued by Him in accordance with the will 
of God his Father, should not obtain a more 
rapid, a more general success. 

* Matt. xi. 21. 



268 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



As for us, remote spectators, tlie astonishment 
must be not the slowness or limited nature of 
that success, but its rapidity and its extent. All 
religions that have taken place in the world's 
history, have been established by moral and by 
material agency ; all appealed from their very 
commencement as much to force as to persuasion, 
as much to the arm as to the tongue. Christi- 
anity alone lived and grew during three centuries 
by its own single native virtue, without any 
other appeal than that made to Truth, without 
any other aid than that of Faith. During those 
three centuries the dogmas, the precepts, and 
the miracles of its Author constituted its only 
weapons, and weapons which have prevailed 
against all other arms. Those dogmas, those 
precepts, and those miracles effected the conquest 
of man's mind and of human society in spite 
of the resistance of Greek philosophy, Eoman 
power, and all the poetical or mystical mytho- 
logies of antiquity marshalled against them. 
The victory has not, it is true, put an end to 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



269 



all struggle of man s intelligence : neither has the 
light from Christ dissipated all darkness, nor 
satisfied all minds ; the explanation and com- 
mentaries of man have obscured the doctrines 
of Christ ; human prejudices have mistaken 
his precepts ; and legends have been grafted 
upon his miracles. But the fact does not the 
less exist, that the dogmas, the precepts, and 
the miracles of Christ, without any aid from 
human sources, sufficed to found and ensure the 
triumph of the Christian religion : this is a fact 
primitive and supreme. And from this single 
result shines forth the divine character of the 
Christian religion, for its triumph without the 
miraculous agency of God, would be of all 
miracles the most impossible to receive. 



IV. JESUS, THE JEWS, AND THE GENTILES. 

" Think not that I am come to destroy the 
law, or the prophets : I am not come to destroy, 
but to fulfil/ 3 * 

* Matt. v. 17. 



270 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

" Do not think that I "will accuse you to the 
Father : there is one that accuseth you, even 
Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed 
Moses, ye would have believed me : for he wrote 
of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how 
shall ye believe my words ? " * This was the 
language that Jesus used to the Jews. It was in 
the name of their history and of their faith, in the 
name of the God of Abraham and of Jacob, that 
He called them to Him, presenting himself to 
them in the double capacity of conservative and 
reformer, and appealing to the ancient law against 
those who, whilst observing it outwardly, really 
changed its character. " Then came to Jesus 
scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, 
saying, Why do thy disciples transgress the tra- 
dition of the elders ? for they wash not their 
hands when they eat bread. But He answered 
and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress 
the commandment of God by your tradition ? 
For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father 

* John v. 45—47. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



271 



and mother : and, He that curseth father or 
mother, let him die the death. But ye say, Who- 
soever shall say to his father or his mother, It 
is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited 
by me ; and honour not his father or his mother, 
he shall be free. Thus ye have made the com- 
mandment of God of none effect by your tradi- 
tion !*.... Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, 
hypocrites ! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise 
and cummin, and have omitted the weightier 
matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith : 
these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the 
other undone." f 

Jesus was incessantly warning, making ap- 
peals to the J ews ; and when He saw that 
they pertinaciously disavowed and rejected Him, 
He cried, in an impulse of patriotic, affec- 
tionate sadness : — "0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 
which killest the prophets, and stonest them 
that are sent unto thee ; how often would I 
have gathered thy children together, as a hen 

* Matt. xv. 1—6. f Matt, xxiii. 23. 



272 



THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOX. 



doth, gather her brood under her wings, and ye 
would not ! " * 

I know nothing more imposing than the appa- 
rition of a grand idea, a divine idea rising and 
mounting rapidly upon the human horizon. Such 
is the spectacle afforded to us in its short dura- 
tion by the history of Jesus Christ. In his first 
instructions to his apostles, He said to them, " Go 
not to the Gentiles and enter not into any city of 
the Samaritans ; but go ye rather to the lost 
sheep of the people of Israel." Thus he carefully 
avoided offending the sentiments of the day, and 
only enjoined upon his apostles what they might 
do with success at the very beginning of their 
mission. But soon the light increases that issues 
from the words and the actions of Jesus ; as I 
advance in the books of the Gospel, I there read : 
"And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, 
there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, 
and saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick 
of the palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus 

* Matt, xxiii. 37. Luke xiii. 34. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



273 



saith unto him, I will come and heal him. The 
centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not 
worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof : 
but speak the word only, and my servant shall he 
healed. For I am a man under authority, having 
soldiers under me : and I say to this man, Go, 
and he goeth ; and to another, Come, and he 
cometh ; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth 
it. When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said 
to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I 
have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. 
And I say unto you, That many shall come from 
the east and west, and shall sit down with Abra- 
ham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of 
heaven/' * 

Thus a great stride has been made ; it is no longer 
for the sheep of the house of Israel that Jesus has 
come ; from the East and from the West will men 
come to Him, and He will receive them all. To 
continue the Gospel narrative : departing from the 
borders of the lake of Gennesareth, Jesus "de- 

* Matt, riii. 5—11, 



274 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



parted into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. And, 
behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same 
coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on 
me, Lord, thou son of David ; my daughter is 
grievously vexed with a devil. But he answered 
her not a word. And his disciples came and be- 
sought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth 
after us. But he answered and said, I am not 
sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of 
Israel. Then came she and worshipped him, 
saying, Lord, help me. But he answered and 
said, It is not meet to take the children's bread, 
and to cast it to dogs. And she said, Truth, 
Lord : yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall 
from their master's table. Then Jesus answered 
and said unto her, woman, great is thy faith : 
be it unto thee even as fchou wilt." * 

Another day, near the city Sychar and the 
well of Jacob, Jesus conversed with a woman of 
Samaria, who had come there to draw water : — 
" The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that 

* Matt. xv. 21—28. 



EIGHTH MEDITATIOX. 



275 



thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshipped in 
this mountain ; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is 
the place where men ought to worship. Jesus 
saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour 
cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, 
nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father .... 
But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true 
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit 
and in truth : for the Father seeketh such to 
worship him. God is a Spirit : and they that 
worship him must worship him in spirit and in 
truth."* 

Thus disappears gradually, in the name of the God 
of the Jews himself, the exclusive privilege of the 
Jews to the divine revelation and to divine grace. 
And thus, too, the restricted religion of Israel 
gives place to the grand catholicity of the reli- 
gion of Christ. The benefit of the true faith and 
of salvation is no longer limited to one people, 
whether great or small, ancient or modern ; but is 
imparted to all the races of mankind. " Go ye 

* John iv. 5—24. 



276 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in 
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
the Holy Ghost." * " And he said unto them, Go 
ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to 
every creature." f 

These were the last words which Christ ad- 
dressed to his apostles, and the apostles execute 
faithfully the instructions of their divine Master ; 
they go forth in effect, preaching in all places 
and to all nations his history, his doctrine, his 
precepts, and his parables. St. Paul is the special 
apostle of the Gentiles. From Jesus, says this 
apostle, " We have received grace and apostle- 
ship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, 
for his name " " Is he the God of the Jews 
only \ is he not also of the Gentiles \ Yes, of the 
Gentiles also." "For there is no difference be- 
tween the Jew and the Greek : for the same Lord 
over all is rich unto all that call upon him."f 

In spite of his prejudices as a Jew, and of the 

* Matt, xxviii. 19. f Mark xvi 15, % Romans i. 5. ; 
iii. 29 ; x. 12. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



277 



differences that took place in the infancy of the 
Church, St. Peter adheres to St. Paul ; the apos- 
tles and the elders assembled at Jerusalem adhere 
to St. Peter and St. Paul. The God of Abraham 
and of Jacob is now not merely the One God, He 
is the God of the whole human race ; to all 
men alike He prescribes the same faith, the same 
law, and promises the same salvation. 

Another question, more temporal in its nature, 
still a great, a delicate one, is raised in the pre- 
sence of Jesus Christ. He withdraws from the 
Jews their exclusive privilege to the knowledge 
and the grace of the true God ; but what does He 
think of that which touches their existence as a 
nation, and as a great one ? Does He direct them 
to rebel and to struggle against their earthly 
governor and sovereign ? — " Then went the Pha- 
risees, and took counsel how they might entangle 
him in his talk. And they sent out unto him 
their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, 
we know that thou art true, and teachest the way 
of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man : 



278 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell 
us therefore, What thinkest thou 1 Is it lawful 
to give tribute unto Cesar, or not \ But Jesus 
perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt 
ye me, ye hypocrites \ Shew me the tribute 
money. And they brought unto him a penny. 
And he saith unto them, Whose is this image 
and superscription 1 They say unto him, Cesar's. 
Then saith he unto them, Eender therefore unto 
Cesar the things which are Cesar's ; and unto 
God the things that are God's. When they had 
heard these words, they marvelled, and left him, 
and went their way." * 

In this reply of Christ there was much more 
matter for admiration than the Pharisees sup- 
posed ; it was in effect much more than an adroit 
evasion of the snare that had been extended for 
Him ; it defined in principle the distinction of 
man's life as it regards religion, and man's life as 
it concerns society ; the bounds, in fact, of Church 
and of State. Caesar has no right to intervene, 

* Matt. xxii. 15-22. Mark xii. 12—17. Luke xx. 19—25. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



279 



with his laws and material force, between the soul 
of man and his God ; and on his side, the faithful 
worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards 
Caesar the duties which the necessity of the 
maintenance of civil order imposes. The inde- 
pendence of religious faith, and at the same time 
its subjection to the laws of society, are alike the 
sense of Christ's reply to the Pharisees, and the 
divine source of the greatest progress ever made 
by human society since it began to feel the 
troubles and agitations of this earth. 

I take again these two grand principles, these 
two great acts of Jesus, — the abolition of every 
privilege in the relations of God and man, and 
the distinction of man's religious and his civil 
life : I confront with these two principles all 
the history, and every state of society previous 
to the advent of Jesus Christ, and I am 
unable to discover in those essentially Christian 
principles any kindred, any human origin. 
Everywhere before Christ, religions were na- 
tional local religions ; they were religions 



280 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



which established between nations, classes, indi- 
viduals, enormous differences and inequalities. 
Everywhere, also, before Christ, man's civil life 
and his religious life were confounded, and mutu- 
ally oppressed each other ; that religion or those 
religions were institutions incorporated in the 
state, which the state regulated or repressed 
as its interest dictated. But in this catholicity 
of religious faith, in this independence of reli- 
gious communities, I am constrained to recog- 
nise new and sublime principles, and to see in 
them flashes from the light of heaven. It needed 
many centuries before mental vision was capable 
of receiving that light ; and no one shall pro- 
nounce how many centuries will be needed before 
it will pervade and penetrate the entire world. 
But whatever difficulties and shortcomings may 
be reserved in the womb of the future for the 
two great truths to which I have just referred, 
it is clear that God caused them first to beam 
forth from the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



281 



V. JESUS AND WOMEN. 

At the very source of all religions, as well as 
in their subsequent history, women find a place 
to fill and a part to perform. At one time they 
constitute the material and furnish the ornament 
of licentious systems of mythology. At another, on 
the contrary, they are, for the heroes of those reli- 
gions, objects either of pious horror or of obser- 
vances at once rigorous and austere : women are 
considered by them as creatures full of evil and 
of peril ; and they are accordingly thrust from 
their lives as men thrust from them what is a 
temptation and an impurity. Voluptuous pictures 
and adventures on the one hand, and zealous 
impulses of rigid asceticism on the other, con- 
stitute the two extremes to which religions in 
their ages of youth and of vigour are alternately 
prone. Sometimes — and it is more fortunate for 
women when it is the case — they are described in 
the narrative of these religions, such as they really 
are in human life, charmers and at the same time 



282 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



charmed, seducers and seduced, idols and slaves ; 
at first votaries of the enthusiasm, the victims of 
the errors and the passions which they at once 
inspire and feel. Whether Asiatic or European, 
rude or refined, such are the striking features 
with which all systems of religion, excepting 
Christianity, have characterised the women whom 
they have introduced in their narratives. 

Neither of these characteristics, nor anything 
analogous, is met with in the Gospel and in the 
relations of Jesus with women. They seem irre- 
sistibly attracted towards Him, with hearts moved, 
imaginations struck by his manner of life, his 
precepts, his miracles, his language. He inspires 
them with feelings of tender respect and confiding 
admiration. The Canaanitish woman comes and 
addresses to Him a timid prayer for the healing 
of her daughter. The woman of Samaria listens 
to Him with eagerness, though she does not know 
Him : Mary seats herself at his feet, absorbed in 
reflections suggested by his words ; and Martha 
proffers to Him the frank complaint that her 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



2S3 



sister assists her not, but leaves her unaided in 
the performance of her domestic duties. The 
sinner draws near to Him in tears, pouring upon 
his feet a rare perfume, and wiping them with 
her hair. The adulteress, hurried into his presence 
by those who wished to stone her in accordance 
with the precepts of the Mosaic Law, remains 
motionless in his presence, even after her accusers 
have withdrawn, waiting in silence what He is 
about to say. Jesus receives the homage, and 
listens to the prayers of all these women, with 
the gentle gravity and impartial sympathy of 
a being superior and strange to earthly passion. 
Pure and inflexible interpreter of the Divine law, 
He knows and understands man's nature, and 
judges it with that equitable severity which 
nothing escapes, the excuse as little as the fault. 
Faith, sincerity, humanity, sorrow, repentance, 
touch Him without biassing the charity and the 
justice of his conclusions; and He expresses b. 7 ame 
or announces pardon with the same calm serenity 
of authority, certain that his eye has read the 



284 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



depths of the heart to which his words will pene- 
trate. In his relations with the women who 
approach Him, there is, in short, not the slightest 
trace of man ; nowhere does the Godhead mani- 
fest itself more winningly and with greater purity. 

And when there is no longer any question of 
these particular relations and conversations, when 
Jesus has no longer before him women suppliants 
and sinners, who are invoking his power or im- 
ploring his clemency ; when it is with the 
position and the destiny of women in general 
that He is occupying himself, He affirms and 
defends their claims and their dignity with a 
sympathy at once penetrating and severe. He 
knows that the happiness of mankind, as 
well as the moral position of women, depends 
essentially upon the married state ; He makes 
of the sanctity of marriage a fundamental law 
of Christian religion and society ; He pursues 
adultery even into the recesses of the human 
heart, the human thought ; He forbids divorce ; 
He says of men, "Have ye not read, that he 



EIGHTH MEDITATIOX. 



285 



winch made them at the beginning made them 
male and female 1 . . . . For this cause shall a 
man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to 
his wife : and they twain shall be one flesh. 
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. 
What therefore God hath joined together, let not 
man put asunder. They say unto him, Why did 
Moses then command to give a writing of divorce- 
ment, and to put her away ? He saith unto them, 
Moses because of the hardness of your hearts 
suffered you to put away your wives : but from 
the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, 
Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be 
for fornication, and shall marry another, commit- 
teth adultery : and whoso marrieth her which is 
put away doth commit adultery." * 

Signal and striking testimony to the progressive 
action of God upon the human race ! Jesus Christ 
restores to the divine law of marriage the purity 
and the authority that Moses had not enjoined to 

* Matt. xix. 4-9 ; v. 27, 28. Mark x. 2—12. Romans 
vii. 2, 3. 1 Corinth, vi. 16—18 ; vii. 1—11. 



286 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

the Hebrews "because of the hardness of their 
hearts." 



VI. JESUS CHRIST AND CHILDREN. 

The sentiments expressed by Jesus Christ 
towards children, and the lansrua^e that He uses 
towards them, as these appear in the Gospel nar- 
rative, must strike even the most careless reader. 
Let me refer to the passages themselves : — 

" And they brought young children to him, that 
he should touch them : and his disciples rebuked 
those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, 
he was much displeased, and said unto them, 
Suffer the little children to come unto me, and 
forbid them not : for of such is the kingdom of 
God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not 
receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he 
shall not enter therein. And he took them up in 
his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed 
them."* 

* Mark x. 13—16 ; Matt. xix. 13-15. Luke xviii. 15—17. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



287 



Another clay, "came the disciples unto Jesus, 
saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of 
heaven % And Jesus called a little child unto 
him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, 
Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, 
and become as little children, ye shall not enter 
into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore 
shall humble himself as this little child, the same 
is greatest in the kingdom of heaven."*' 5 " 

Again another day, Jesus, deploring the cold- 
ness that his preaching and his miracles fre- 
quently encountered, and that even in his closest 
vicinity, exclaimed, here no longer addressing 
his disciples, but God himself, "I thank thee, 
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because 
thou hast hid these things from the wise and 
prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." f 

What is the full meaning of these words ? They 
are not simply the expression of that impulse of 
gentle benevolence excited in all hearts at the 
sight of children, and their innocent confidence in 

* Matt, xviii. 1—4 ; Mark ix. 33-37. f Matt. xi. 25. 



288 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



all who come near them. Jesus Christ no doubt 
experienced the influence of this feeling, for He 
was strange to none of man s noble emotions ; 
but his thoughts passed far beyond the children 
whose approach he permitted, and they merely 
furnished Him with the living occasion to address 
to men themselves his solemn warnings. 

The child, I have already mentioned in these 
Meditations,* is, for us, the image of innocence, 
the type of the creature fallible, yet who has not 
yet sinned, who knows not yet either error of 
understanding, or the seduction of passion, or the 
blinding influence of pride, or the troubles of 
doubt, or the extreme folly of sin, or the anguish of 
repentance ; who follows in the first impulses of 
infancy only the spontaneous instincts of tender 
confidence in the parent to whom he is indebted 
for security and for love, for the first joys and the 
earliest blessings. Jesus does not pretend to bring 
men back to that fair condition, to restore to 
them their primitive innocence : but He comes to 

* Meditation II. , Christian Dogmas, p. 48. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



289 



ransom them from sin ; He brings them the hope 
of pardon and salvation. Confidence in God, a 
confidence sincere, unpretending, and loving, is 
that disposition which opens the soul of man to the 
divine blessing. This is also the disposition that 
the child evinces towards its parents ; he calls 
upon them, and he hopes in them. Hence those 
words of Jesus : " Suffer little children to come 
unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the 
kingdom of heaven." The way of innocence is a 
far better way than that of science to lead man up 
to God. 

Science is a splendid thing ; it is also a noble 
privilege of man that God, in creating him an 
intelligent and a free agent, has given him a 
capacity to desire and to pursue through study 
the truths of science, and even to attain them in 
a certain measure, and in a certain sphere. But 
when science attempts to exceed that measure and 
to quit that sphere; when it ignores and scorns the 
instincts, — natural, universal, and permanent in- 
stincts, of the human soul ; when it essays to set 



290 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



rip everywhere its own torch in the place of that 
primitive light that lights mankind: then, and 
from that cause alone, science fills itself with 
error ; and this is the very case which called 
forth those words of Jesus : " I praise thee, Father, 
Lord of heaven and of earth, that thou hast hid- 
den these things from the wise and prudent, and 
hast revealed them unto babes." * 



VII. JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF. 
I have sought to gather from the Gospels the 
scattered facts that constitute the life of Jesus. 
I have searched for them in his acts, his precepts, 
his words : in his different relations in life. I 
have added nothing, exaggerated nothing ; on the 
contrary, the life of Jesus is infinitely grander 
and more sublime than I have made it; his 

* Matt. xi. 25. The words airh aocpwv koX o-wstuv are better 
rendered, " from the learned and the prudent," than "wise and 
intelligent;" " sages et intelligents," as in the French version 
by Osterwald. 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



291 



words are infinitely more profound and admirable 
than I have described them. And I have said 
nothing of the seal affixed to Ms work and Ms 
mission by his Passion ; nor have I shown Jesus 
at Gethsemane and upon the Cross. 

According to the Bible, God is without parallel 
— ever the same. Jesus is also so according to 
the Gospel. The most perfect, the most constant 
unity reigns in Him : in his life as in his soul; 
in his language as in his acts. His action is pro- 
gressive, and proportionate to the circumstances 
which call it forth and in the midst of which He 
fives ; but his progress never entails any change 
of character or purpose. As He appears at the 
age of twelve, hi the Temple, already full of the 
sentiment of his divine nature, in his reply to 
his mother who was searching for Him with dis- 
quietude, "Kno west thou not that I must be about 
my Father's business'?" the same He remains and 
manifests himself in the whole course of his 
active mission — in Galilee and at Jerusalem, with 
his apostles and with the people, amongst the 



292 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



Pharisees and the Publicans, whether they be men, 
or women, or children who approach Him ; alike 
before Caiaphas and Pilate, and under the eyes 
of the crowd pressing around to listen to Him. 
Everywhere and in every circumstance, the same 
spirit animates Him ; He diffuses the same light, 
proclaims the same law. Perfect and immutable, 
always at once Son of God and Son of Man, He 
pursues and consummates amidst all the trials 
and all the sorrows of human existence his divine 
work for the salvation of mankind. 

What need to add more \ How speak in detail 
of Jesus himself when one believes in Him, when 
one sees in Him God made man, acting as God 
alone can act, and suffering all that man can 
suffer to ransom mankind from sin, and save it 
by bringing it back to God ? How sound closely 
the mysteries of such a person and such a pur- 
pose ? What passed in that divine soul during 
that human existence ? Who shall explain those 
cries of agony of Jesus in the bosom of the most 
absolute faith in God his father and in himself, 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



293 



and those moments of horror at the approach of 
the sacrifice without the slightest hesitation in 
the sacrifice, without the smallest doubt as to its 
efficaciousness ? This sublime fact, this intimate 
and continual intermixture of the divine and 
human finds no competent, no adequate ex- 
pression in human speech, and the more we 
consider it the more difficult we find it to speak 
of it. 

Those who have no faith in Jesus, who admit 
not the supernatural character of his person, of 
his life, and of his work, do not feel this difficulty. 
Having beforehand done away with God and 
with miracles, the history of Jesus is for them 
nothing more than an ordinary history, which 
they narrate and explain like any other biography 
of man. But such historians fall into a far dif- 
ferent difficulty, and wreck themselves on a far 
different rock. The supernatural being and 
power of Jesus may be disputed, but the per- 
fection, the sublimity of his actions and of his 
precepts, of his life and of his moral law, are 



294> THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



incontestable. And in effect, not only are they 
not contested, but they are admired and celebrated 
enthusiastically, and complacently, too ; it would 
seem as if it were desired to restore to Jesus as 
man, and man alone, the superiority "of which 
men deprive Him in refusing to see in Him the 
Godhead. But then, what incoherence, what 
contradictions, what falsehood, what moral im- 
possibility in his history, such as they make it ; 
what a series of suppositions, irreconcilable with 
fact, nevertheless admitted! The man they 
make so perfect, so sublime, becomes by turns 
a dreamer or a charlatan; at once dupe and 
deceiver : dupe of his own mystical enthusiasm 
in believing in his own miracles; deceiver in 
tampering with evidence in order to accredit him- 
self. The history of Jesus Christ is thus but a 
tissue of fables and falsehood. And nevertheless 
the hero of this history remains perfect, sublime, 
incomparable ; the greatest genius, the noblest 
heart that the world ever saw ; the type of virtue 
and moral beauty, the supreme and rightful chief 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



295 



of mankind. And his disciples, in their turn 
justly admirable, have braved everything, suf- 
fered everything, in order to abide faithful to 
Him and to accomplish his work. And, in 
effect, the work has been accomplished : the 
pagan world has become Christian, and the whole 
world has nothing better to do than to follow 
the example. 

What a contradictory and insolvable problem 
they present to us instead of the one they are 
so anxious to suppress! 

History reposes upon two foundations — posi- 
tive written evidence as to facts and persons, and 
presumptive evidence resulting from the connec- 
tion of facts and the action of persons. These 
two foundatioDS are entirely lost sight of in 
the history of Jesus such as it is recounted, 
or rather constructed, in these days ; it is, on 
the one hand, in evident and shocking contra- 
diction with the testimony of the men who saw 
Jesus, or of the men who lived nearly in 
the time of those who had seen Him • on the 



296 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



other side, with, the natural laws presiding over 
the actions of men and the course of events. 
This does not deserve the name of historical 
criticism ; it is a philosophical system and a ro- 
mantic narrative substituted for the substantial 
proof and the circumstantial evidence ; it is a 
Jesus false and impossible, made by the hand of 
man pretending to dethrone the real living Jesus 
— the Son of God. 

The choice lies between the system and the 
mystery; between the romance of man and the 
purpose of God. Even in revealing himself God 
still interposes veils, but these veils are no false- 
hoods. The Gospel history of Jesus shows us 
God acting in ways which are not his ways of 
every day. This special action of God characterises 
also many other facts in the history of the uni- 
verse ; amongst others, the great fact of the actual 
creation, where man, at his appearance upon earth, 
received the first divine revelation. The super- 
natural does not merely date from Jesus Christ ; 
and if a man from this motive rejects the history 



EIGHTH MEDITATION. 



297 



of J esus, he will have to deny also a far different 
thing. To escape this fatal necessity, men of 
learning have recently striven to curtail indefi- 
nitely the proportion of the supernatural in the 
history of Jesus, and to explain by natural means, 
most of the acts and circumstances of his life. A 
puerile attempt, which has altogether failed in the 
details, still leaving untouched the substance of 
the problem. No better success will attend the 
new attempt that has in these days been made, 
and which consists in placing the Ideal in the 
place of the Supernatural, and in elevating reli- 
gious sentiment upon the ruins of the Christian 
faith. This is doing either too much or too little. 
The human soul is not satisfied with these 
leavings, nor human pride with such refusals, 
When one is so hardy as to pretend, in the name 
of the science of man in this finite world, to 
determine the limits of the power of God, one 
must be still more hardy and — dethrone God 
himself. 



NOTE. 



I said (p. 145) that I would indicate some 
instances of grammatical faults to be met with 
in the Scriptures, to which the character of divine 
inspiration cannot be assigned. Upon the subject 
of the books of the Old Testament I have con- 
sulted my learned confrere, M. Munk ; his reply 
is in the precise words which follow : — 

" The biblical authors," he writes to me, " whose style is 
most incorrect, are Ezekiel and Jeremiah. These authors, 
and particularly the first, err frequently against grammar 
and orthography ; they are not merely influenced by the Ara- 
mean dialect, but they disclose grammatical faults capable 
of being traced to no source in any of the Semitic dialects. 
This remark has also been made by Hebrew grammarians 
of the middle ages, and Isaac Abrabanel (towards the close 
of the 15th century), in the preface to his commentary upon 
Ezekiel, does not hesitate to declare that this prophet was 
but superficially acquainted with Hebrew grammar and ortho- 
graphy. Nevertheless, neither Jeremiah nor Ezekiel, of whom 



300 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



both are distinguished by a certain originality of style, 
unlike that of any of the other Hebrew writers, is wanting 
in elegance, energy, and boldness in images, and they dis- 
play in the highest degree their proficiency in the art of 
composition. The following are some instances of the 
grave faults against grammar to be met with in their 
writings :— 

Examples of Incorrect Expressions in Ezehiel. 

EmnntPE nam (mischta'haivithem), "and they wor- 
shipped" (viii. 16), a barbarism for D^nnttffc (misch- 

taliawim). 

"iKtPN^ (we-neschaar ani), " and I remained " (xi. 8), 
for "ISCTWI (wa-eschaer) or YT)Nttf3*l (ive-nischarti). 
(There are here faults both of orthography and * 
grammar.) 

ntPN (ischoth), " women " (xxiii. 44), for "to (nesclie). 
TnblS (schiVa), " his seven burnt offerings " (xl. 

26), for 2?ntfl (scMbcC). In the number seven the mas- 
culine is used instead of the feminine. 

WIXD (bi-benothayikh), " in that thou buildest " (xvi. 31), 
instead of ^msnn (bi-benothelch). 

^rtfttn (be-schoubeni), " when I returned " (xlvi. 7), instead 
of *»nitt?n (be-schoubi). 

inDp NrQn (gabehd), " his height was exalted " (xxxi. 5), 
instead of Jims (gabehd). The last letter is aleph, 
for he. 

The Chaldean plural is used in several words, for instance : 



NOTE. 



301 



Vtan (Mttin), " wheat " (iv. 9), for Q^n ('Mttim) ; 
V^n (ha-iyyin), " the isles," or " the isles in the sea " 
(xxvi. 18), instead of n>sn (ha-iyyim), an error in both 
orthography and grammar. 

Examples of Incorrect Expressions in Jeremiah. 

rrTOlM (6MM\ "I will destroy" (xlvi. 8), for rTTONN 
(aabidd). 

iTna (nibbetha), " hast thon prophesied " (xxvi. 9), instead 
of nboa (nibbetJia). The syllable be has a yod instead 
of an aleph. 

lawn (athanou) "we come" (iii. 22), instead of iaV"lN 
(athinou.). 

^nw (#^)> "thee" in the feminine (terminating with yod 
mute), for riW (atf), a Syriasm very frequent in Jere- 
miah, who often forms the second person of the perfect 
fern, in VI- (t followed by yod) instead of H" (t). 

Nib (Id written with waw quiescent), " not " very often for 
sb (16 without the waw). 

nban (hoglath), "shall be carried away captive" (xiii. 19), 
instead of nnban (hogletha). The latter Chaldaism 
we meet also in the Pentateuch (Leviticus xxv. 22) ; 
nt£?n (ive'asath), "her fruits (shall) come in," for 
nntP^n (iue , asetah), and ibid. xxvi. 34 ; ns^m (we- 
hi^zath), "she shall enjoy," for nnmm (we-hir- 
cethd). 

With respect to the New Testament, I have 



302 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



required a similar notice from my son William, 
who has made the Greek language in general, and 
its deviations in the writings of the Gospel, the 
object of particular and careful study. I insert, 
also, the note which he has drawn up upon the 
subject :— 

" On first approaching the text of the New Testament, 
after haying leamt the Greek language and grammar in the 
classical writers, we are struck by numerous irregularities of 
expression : amongst these, however, we must carefully dis- 
tinguish those which constitute merely particular and singu- 
lar modes of expression from those which are real faults. 
The former are susceptible of explanation and justifica- 
tion by different examples and different arguments ; the 
latter are not capable of being reconciled with the elemen- 
tary and necessary laws of language. Thus we may justify 
such or such a strange form of conjugation or of declen- 
sion, which would be accounted a barbarism by a school- 
boy, but which was nevertheless in actual use in some one 
or other of the local dialects, written and spoken by the 
Greeks. Again, however it may have been the rule in 
Greek to set the verb in the singular when used with a 
neuter substantive in the plural, the rule has not been 
invariably observed even by the purest classical writers, 
and we may justify by exceptions collected here and there 
in their compositions, several passages of the New Testa- 



NOTE. 



ment which, at first sight, might appear amenable to a 
charge of solecism, Thus, in short, after our attention 
having, at first sight, been arrested and our minds discon* 
certed by other passages in which the sacred writer has 
confounded the sense of two words which resemble each 
other, as fiap-vpojiatj which signifies summon « witness, and 
which St. Peter employs instead of fmprvpeco which means, 
give testimony,* as abwareiv, which signifies to de in* 
capable, and which St. Matthew and St. Mark employ in 
the sense of being impossible,^— as fieffovpavrj/ia, which signi- 
fies the meridian or zenith of a star, and which, on three 
occasions in the Xew Testament, is used in the sense of 
in the middle of the air, — or, even when we meet words, not 
merely strange to the ear, but formed without attention to 
the rules and in contradiction to analogy, as wuBos for 
7rudavos^ — we may again, without any departure from logical 
rules, by judicious or subtle distinctions, escape from the 
difficulties which the passages suggest, and have a perfect 
right to do so. But after haying made allowances for the 
irregularities susceptible of explanation in the language of 
the New Testament, there still remain some which are real 
faults. The same word cannot be written by the same 
hand, at an interval of but three pages, both masculine and 
feminine, as the word tpis, rainbow, in the Apocalypse. § 
"When the substantive is feminine, the adjective cannot be 
masculine, as ttiv \rivov . . tov tiiyav* When the 



* 1 Peter i. 11. f Matt. xvii. 20 ; Luke i. 37. % 1 Cor. ii. 4. 
§ (Compare iv. 3, and x, 1. || Apoc. xiv. 19. 



304 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



substantive is in the accusative, the adjective cannot be in 
the nominative. In such an employment of words we are 
able to trace in the sacred writings the hand of man, marks 
of human imperfection and error; and we must not forget 
that these faults become more numerous and grosser the 
greater the antiquity of the MS. in which we find them, 
and the purer the Jewish origin of the writer. Thus the 
Greek of the Apocalypse is singularly incorrect, at the 
same time that the imaginative turn of the expression is 
remarkably Hebraic* In the text, styled the received 
text, and which was fixed in the 16th century, many of 
these faults have disappeared, because it has borrowed from 
MSS. of then recent date. But now that biblical philosophy 
has mounted higher, we can discern how the copyists, one 
after the other, actuated by pious scruples, or thinking only 
to correct some error of their predecessors, have little by 
little effaced what appeared to them too great a departure 
from rules to have been written by an evangelist or an 
apostle. At the present day, these admitted irregularities 
are an element indispensible to every serious discussion re- 
specting the nature and extent of the divine inspiration to 
be met with in the sacred volume. 

* Apoc. i. 16 ; iii. 12 ; iv. 7 ; ix. 13 & 14 ; xiv. 12 ; xvi. 13; 
xx. 2, &c. 

THE END. 



BRADPURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEKRIARS. 



r 



I 



